


Fimbulwinter

by illwynd



Category: Norse Religion & Lore, Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Adopted Siblings, Alternate Universe, Anthropomorphic Personifications, Blood, Character Death, M/M, Magic, Reincarnation, Seasonal Spirits and Guardians, Winter, awkward courtship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-09-14 09:20:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9173287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: Fimbulwinter, the winter without end, has begun. The people of the village have somehow endured. But then one day, Thor, born at the end of the last summer, meets a stranger in the woods.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by Terry Pratchett's _Wintersmith_ and Steeleye Span's collaborative album of the same name. Listening to the song "You" has always made me want to write a thorki AU for it, so here it is.
> 
> My gratitude to [Lise](http://gorgeousgalatea.tumblr.com/) for betaing!

Thor was born at the end of the last summer, and he was one of only a few such children to survive the winter that came on.

It was a winter of brutal, biting cold and raging storms and deadlier stillness, the creaking of ice and the silence of beasts and wind. The muffled hush of deepening snow. It was a cruel winter. But we did not at first know that it was to be an endless one.

The dancers at the Midwinter Feast shivered, bells jangling cold, the sun gone down long ago while the pots still stewed and the folk still trudged to where they would spend what was meant to be the longest night. But no one yet whispered any worries, only built the fires higher. Only as the weeks passed and the days grew no longer—the shadow markings on the stone still set at their farthest point, even as the new constellations of spring crept into the sky—only then did fear begin to spread. When the winter’s early rage was spent and its deep, quiet chill settled in to stay.

Thor was but a tiny infant then, held in his mother’s arms, wrapped in warm blankets with only the sunshine blond of his head peeking out. He surely knew nothing of the worry that was turning to deep dread across the village with every day that passed with no sign of a thaw.

The rest of us began to take what measures we could.

Some put their energies into ritual. Incantations and prayers. Sacrifices and offerings now, while there was something left to spare. Stomping feet and banging sticks and little cheerful fires and fragrant smoke rising up in pleas for the sun’s return.

Others, more practical, began to tighten their belts, holding in reserve their dwindling stores from last autumn’s harvest and instead setting out traps for snow-hares and other beasts that left their tracks in the fields of white.

But there were also some who were not satisfied with waiting, with hoping, with sitting upon casks of corn and apples like a squirrel perched upon a winter’s store of acorns. Their choice was to seek out answers, sending a hardy young man by the name of Mimir to trek to find the seer who lived alone in a nearby wood.

Mimir was gone three weeks, and we had nearly given up waiting when he reappeared at the village gates, beard rimed white, face thin and haggard and drawn.

His pack was gone, his boots worn nearly through, and he sat huddled by the fire, eyes blank in the ruddy glare, and said nothing until all the ice upon his person had melted.

When he did, his voice was dull, and the words he spoke spread like cold blue wildfire among us.

“The Fimbulwinter is upon us. The spirit of summer has passed away. Surely it is the end of the world.”

*

The Fimbulwinter.

We all knew the tale, of course, but all of us had hoped against hope that we would not live to see it in our own time. We had not dared to speak the name.

The endless winter upon winter, with no summers in between. The green growing things buried under ever-deeper snow, with too little sunlight to nourish them had anyone gone to the trouble of uncovering some little patch of garden. And the beasts that ate the leaves soon growing gaunt and dying, or fleeting in herds in the night—a rumble like a passing storm—only to be found frozen in some hidden gully miles away when anyone followed the trampled trail. And then, when the prey were gone, the hunting beasts would turn ravenous. The wolves would sweep down upon the villages that remained, and whether the folk there triumphed or fell, it would make little difference in the end.

The maw of winter would consume all things.

The word spread among us of the coming of those final days, and even the bravest shivered and quailed.

But the Aesir are a hardy folk, and we endured, somehow. Surviving one day’s hunger and cold and dangers led to another, and another. We trudged onward like a drunkard lost upon a forest path, knowing only the next plodding footstep. Somehow, day to day, we endured.

We saved the children where we could, the youngest and most helpless, finding within ourselves some hope that someday they might see the spring.

*

Frigga kept the fire fed.

It was the only thing that did not hunger, for there was plenty of wood to be had, even if it meant wandering out farther afield each time, or relying on the little clans of young men—children, really, too young to hunt or raid, yet old enough to wander and together strong enough to defend themselves if need be—to leave a few bundles of wood at her door as but one stop upon their route.

And she was glad of that, for at least she and Thor could thus be warm.

It was Thor’s third year of life—his third winter, they used to say, except such a phrase no longer held meaning—and he was already dying, and she could do nothing to save him.

He was thin, dreadfully thin, and he cried often from hunger and fright, his eyes wet with tears more often than not. They were a shade of blue that had long since leached from the sky, and Frigga often gazed into them, holding her son for comfort.

She herself had barely eaten in months, but she was older, more able to endure. She sang to him and whispered to him, stroked his golden hair, and tried to keep herself from imagining the man he could have grown into, lest she weep as well.

She also tried to keep herself from thinking of her husband, lost in one of the first raids over a year before.  And she, with no one else in the household, had been left to survive on her own. She had done well, admirably well, to keep them both alive this long.

“Mama, I’m hungry,” Thor said again, his tiny voice from his tiny body, his huge eyes blinking in the firelight.

Frigga’s heart broke for the thousandth time.

*

It was past midnight when the clattering woke her.

It sounded like the creak of wooden wheels and the soft clanking of bells, and it sounded near, in her own yard.

Frigga almost feared to peer out, and when she did, it was to the sight of a large, shadowy shape in the blustery gloom. But something about the sight made her hurry to shove her feet into her boots and throw a fur around her shoulders and rush out into the snow.

In the center of the yard, at the end of a broken track through the snow, there was a pair of goats and an old woman standing there on legs like sticks wrapped in cloth but with a determined look upon her wrinkled face. And there was also an old, rickety cart filled with jars of something frozen and white.

The old woman’s toothless mouth pulled into a smile, and she pressed the goats’ rope leads into Frigga’s astonished hands.

“She’s stopped giving milk, starved as we all are, and he’s a pain in the arse,” the old woman rasped out, voice ravaged by the cold. “But what I’ve saved is yours. For the little one.”

Frigga’s eyes flickered between the woman and the cart with its jar after jar of milk, and she threw her arms around the old woman, a sob escaping in her gratitude.

She insisted the old woman stay the night, and she put on a kettle of water for tea (and to thaw one of the jars at once) and they sat at the kitchen table for hours, talking. A conversation like Frigga could barely remember, where she did not feel doom breathing upon her neck, a drive to do _something_ when there was nothing to be done. Instead it was like the old days, when the women would gather together on summer evenings, perhaps a bit of knitting in their laps but mostly taking their ease together, unworried, enjoying each other’s company.

It turned out the old woman had lived at the edge of the village for years, and hardly anyone knew her, but she had once been a seiðkona of some renown.

By the second cup of tea, she had dug a tiny book from a bag tied to her waist and pushed it across the table toward Frigga, who opened the cover carefully. The pages inside were covered with handwriting, tiny and crabbed but legible enough, and Frigga skimmed down the open pages until she recognized…

“Spells?”

The old woman nodded. “Mostly my own, but some I learned from my teachers. There are a few for growing things; I tried and I think it would have worked, but there’s only one of me, and I’m old and tired. Can’t go building a greenhouse just for myself.”

Frigga knew of magic but until that moment it had always been a distant thing, stories from her grandmothers or tales even older than that.

“Thank you,” she said earnestly, closing the book’s cover and clutching it like a treasure.

The old woman smiled her toothless grin again. “I think that milk’s warmed now. Go give the boy some, and I’ll just have a bit of a rest.”

Frigga nodded and filled a small cup at the stove and went into Thor’s bedroom with it, waking him gently, having him sit and take small sips, just a little at a time, so that he would not get a bellyache.

“There you go, dearheart,” she said when the cup was emptied and Thor lay down again, curling up under the blankets. “When you wake, there will be more.”

“Really, Mama?”

Those huge blue eyes again, and Frigga felt her own grow moist.

“Yes, my son. Truly.”

Frigga found she was not entirely surprised when she reached the kitchen again and found the old woman slumped in her chair, arms folded across her chest and chin drooping, like someone who has reached an age where naps can occur anywhere.

Yet her tea, unfinished, had gone cold on the table, and her chest had ceased to rise and fall, and the slits of her eyelids revealed staring eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Thor was fifteen when he was first allowed to go out with the raiding parties.

“I’ll be fine! It’s only a short journey this time anyway,” he told his best friend, Sif, when she scowled after he bragged of it to her.

He knew her worry for him wasn’t the entire reason for her scowl; a few years before, he had secretly passed on his lessons in hunting and fighting to his friend, and she had always said she wished to go out raiding with the men when she grew enough. But then she had proved to have a talent for seiðr that even she could not deny. It was magic of the most important kind: things she touched grew and flourished, even in the dark and the cold.

She had not protested at her fate, but Thor could still see it in her eyes.  

“Probably you will be fine, if you actually stay with the others and don’t risk yourself,” she said. “Don’t make me wish I had been there to guard your back, Thor.”

Thor promised. But he had been waiting for this day for years, since he was old enough to hold a weapon.

He had always felt a little guilty to watch others ride away and bring back what little could still be won or stolen. Guilty to eat beside them, when he had only contributed through a few hares or fish caught from beneath the ice, or the milk and meat from the goats he still helped his mother keep. Sif would be feeding him soon if he did not go.

He hugged her before he left, comforted by her familiar warmth, her strong body against his. He hugged his mother as well, and he tried not to notice the lines at the corners of her eyes or how small she seemed.

“It’s my turn now to care for you,” he said, smiling against her hair, feeling her squeeze a little tighter.

And then he trudged away through the snow with the rest of the men.

*

A week and two days later he sat on a fallen log, shivering.

The raid had gone well, and the others were merely gathering everything into packs that could be carried (or, rather, loaded upon the sleds that were the most sensible means of transport upon the snow), but Thor felt unsettled.

It had not been what he expected. He had thought he had no illusions—the raids were a dreadful necessity, as he had been told since he was small, and they took from those just like themselves, but either everyone would slowly starve or a few could thrive. That was what he had always been told. And it was not their own kin they had been attacking; they went far enough for that, so that every face was a strange one. He had just helped to ensure that some small child of his own village would not starve. He had put food in his mother’s mouth, in Sif’s.

Yet he knew his dreams would be filled for some time with the things he had seen and done and understood, and so he had wandered off, unsettled, while the others were loading up the sleds, and now he perched with his elbows on his knees, a heavy churning in his belly that was not a pang of hunger.

Then the hair rose on the back of his neck, and he looked quickly behind him, only there was no one there.

A soft, near-silent crunching in the snow somewhere off to his left…

“Hello?” he called, head turning fast.

No one answered, muffled silence and empty stillness, his own quiet breaths. A flutter of wings as a blackbird took flight from the branches of an evergreen. Thor cast about for a moment, in nervous confusion, before settling.

Then he saw it.

In front of him, about three paces away, there was a shadow, and the big, white flakes fell and drifted all around it, but not through it. The snow on the ground behind it had been disturbed, like muddled footprints but so light and faint he could not make out anything about them. Just their meandering path that ended where the shadow was.

It was a shape, about the same size as him, but that was all he could tell, and he leapt off the log and grasped in a panic at the hammer that hung from his belt, holding it ready to strike. But the shadow did not seem to take any threat from this and only stood there. Perhaps its head tilted. Perhaps it was a trick of the light.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Thor cried, frantic, trying to sound certain of himself but undoubtedly failing.

The shape did not move, but Thor thought he heard the wind whispering. Echoing.

_“What… are you?”_

The shadow seemed to move closer, though Thor did not see any new footprints appear.

He blinked and waved the hammer wildly. “Stay back!”

 _“... back…”_ the wind echoed once again.

As Thor watched there was a shimmering in the air, the snow falling through the shadow seeming to turn into a thin haze, and then there was something more like an outline, and he could almost see a face within it. A pair of eyes that stared back at him. Not malevolent, but curious.

Heart beating fast and sweat bursting on his skin beneath his furs, Thor swung the hammer in one broad, unaimed swing at whatever it was and then turned on his heel and ran, full out, feet pounding on the snowy ground and lungs burning with the cold.

When he emerged from the shadow under the ice-boughed trees he looked back, already feeling foolish.

Surely there had been nothing there. It was a trick of the light, strange sounds of wind and forest, a deception of his eyes and ears.

He did not tell anyone what he had seen. He did not so much as mention it.

*

More years passed in endless winter, more cold and arduous times, day after day.

Twenty years we had endured in all, and the children who had never seen the spring were coming of an age to take over the roles of their elders.

There were far fewer elders left than before. Our little community was slowly dwindling, by necessity, the raids becoming less fruitful and the limits of what could be coaxed from the frozen ground by magic being pressed with every season. The beasts becoming rarer and craftier, swifter to run from the muffled sound of Aesir feet and better able to hide while our hunting parties passed.

But those children knew no other life, and so they held some hope for the future. To them the cold was familiar; they did not bother to curse it. To them, it was simply the world that was. Survival in the cold, the darkness forever encroaching upon the few hours of sunlight each day, and finding some happiness despite it.

*

Thor walked the perimeter of the lands that belonged to the village, checking each of his traps in turn and, so far, finding nothing.

The landscape was a perfect crisp white; new snow had fallen the night before while he slept, a few inches only but enough to cover old tracks and traces, and the air today was cold and smelled faintly of salt and ozone. Thor breathed it in through the thick wool scarf wrapped around his face across his ruddy cheeks, and when he exhaled again the little wisps of breath that crept out were white. He flexed his fingers in his gloves and continued his long trek.

He didn’t mind the winter, though he had been told how much easier life was before and by comparison how hard it was now. And he knew that it was true, knew how precarious their survival was. But somehow, at the same time, that truth seemed less real than the loveliness of a snowy landscape sparkling under the pale morning sun. The peacefulness of it—Thor supposed that if the world was truly ending, he was glad that at least there was some beauty left.

At 20 years of age, it was also hard for him to believe that the world would truly end.

This train of thought ground to a halt when Thor came over the rise of a hill to the little copse where one of his traps was hidden, but this one, unlike the rest he had visited that morning, had been sprung.

And then it had been robbed.

Thor crouched down beside the ruins of the snare in the snow, studying the broken pieces, a frown on his face.

It had not been another beast’s work—there were no traces, no fur or blood on the snow, and no tracks of wolf or fox or cat.

There were footprints, though, and they were very fresh.

It was rare for anyone else to trespass on Aesir territory now—the last such theft, he had gathered a group to track the culprit back to a nearby village and taken back what he was owed, with interest.

So Thor set his jaw and prepared to follow these tracks for just the same purpose.

He followed them a few paces, around a snow-covered yew, down a steep dip beneath the trees.

And there the tracks ended at the feet that had left them, standing there peering back at him, without a hint of fear.

Thor stared at the man, a stranger the likes of whom he’d never seen before.

He was thin, angular, but not with the gauntness of starvation. Instead, it seemed a natural tendency.

He was pale, so pale his skin seemed barely darker than the snow, just the faintest tinge of color, and it was set off by the smooth mane of night black. He wore a blue tunic that didn’t seem anywhere near warm enough for the weather, with only a little scrap of fur at his shoulders, and fur boots covered his feet below bare, thin legs. His long, graceful hands were gloveless.

Thor closed his mouth, remembering what he was there for.

“Did you steal from my trap?” he asked, indignation rising.

The stranger blinked at him, green eyes like a frozen garden pool.

“No?” he said. “I only let the rabbit go. What did you want with it anyway? It was making such a horrible racket.”

Thor’s eyes widened with yet more outrage.

“I wanted to eat it, of course! Why did you let it go? That was _my_ trap!”

The other man looked at him in bafflement.

“There are other things you can eat, though?” He said it like a question, head tilted to one side, shoulders lifting in a shrug.

“Not enough!” Thor snapped.

The stranger shuffled his feet, which called Thor’s attention back to his boots, his bare legs, his strange attire… his strangeness overall.

“Where are you from?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.

The other man shrugged again. “Everywhere.”

“And what’s your name?”

That was somehow, apparently, a harder question, for the man had to ponder it, and when he did answer, it sounded almost as if he were merely repeating something he’d been told.

“Loki,” he said at last. “And what are you called?”

Thor scowled. “Thor.”

The other man—Loki—smiled for the first time then, and he took a hesitant step nearer. “I like the color of your hair. Is it always like that?”

Loki was still approaching, fingers lifting toward him, while Thor tried to comprehend.

“Yes, it’s always—stop that!” he shouted, batting Loki’s hand away. “I didn’t say you could touch me!”

Loki looked hurt, but he retreated half a step. “But I want to know you…”

Thor huffed air through his nose. “We have enough mouths to feed in the village already. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Thor probably should have killed him. He knew that; this was a stranger, and one who’d already proved himself a nuisance, messing with Thor’s traps. But he didn’t want to. He looked at Loki with his thin clothes and bare, pale legs, and the thought upset him.

He let out another frustrated huff of breath. “Just go, and leave my traps alone!”

Loki frowned and stared at him once more with those hurt eyes, but then he obeyed, turning in his snowy fur boots and dashing away, disappearing as a blur of blue and white and black in the shadows under the trees.

When Thor got home (with only one rabbit to show for it, and grumbling to himself how it might have been two), he almost said nothing to anyone. Sif, however, noticed his unusual silence.

“What happened?” she asked, scrubbing the garden dirt from under her nails as they got ready for supper.

“There was a… I met a stranger in the woods.”

Thor realized he had no intention of saying that the stranger had cost them part of their meal, though he wasn’t sure why he felt any urge to protect Loki’s reputation. Surely Thor would never see him again.

Sif glanced at him with concern. “Well? And what happened? Where was he from? What did he want?”

“I don’t know,” Thor replied, answering all of her questions at once.

*

A week later, checking the same (repaired) trap, the hairs on the back of Thor’s neck rose at a sudden icy breeze, like cold fingers tickling at his skin, and he stiffened and turned.

Somehow he was not surprised to find Loki standing only a few paces behind him. But even before he could shout, the strange man was speaking.

“You said you lacked sufficient things to eat, right?”

Drawn up short by that, Thor nodded, and Loki’s eyes glittered.

“If I bring you beasts like the one I loosed from your trap, will you let me look at you more?”

What a strange request that was.

“You want to… _look_ at me?”

Eagerly, Loki nodded. “And touch you, but you said you don’t want that. So looking is enough.”

Thor found himself staring at Loki’s slender hands, the blue-white beds of his neatly trimmed nails, the little jagged scar across one knuckle. And he heard his own voice answering, as if in a trance.

“If you bring food… then yes, you can look at me. But I’m one of the better hunters in my village, and even I can’t find much these days. I don’t know where you’re going to get very many more rabbits,” he added.

Loki only shrugged. “It doesn’t sound difficult to me.”

Thor decided to ignore that; he had other questions that seemed more pressing just then.

“And why do you want to just look at me?”

Loki’s icy green eyes flickered away, not meeting his anymore, and he swayed slightly, as if caught by the breeze. “I’ve been alone for a long time,” he answered, voice wavering.

That, Thor thought, at least that made sense.

Later, after Thor had asked a little warily if there was anything else Loki had come for, and after Loki had shaken his head and darted off again, Thor trudged home wondering how the man had survived if he had been alone for so long. He looked little older than Thor and might easily have been younger.

Had Loki been orphaned and somehow lived in the wilds by himself since he was a child? Was that the reason he seemed so odd, so unused to civilized ways?

Thor kept thinking about it even after he was home, while he, Sif, and his mother worked together at preparing dinner.

It was their turn in the rotation that Frigga had insisted upon long ago, in which those households with more took turns hosting those with less, the elderly and the injured and the sick and the youngsters who lacked any other means of staying fed. Those meals always took many hands to make as much food as was required. It was good work, though, rewarding and clean, and it left plenty of time for thinking and talking. Thor enjoyed it, and he liked even more that it usually involved listening to his friend and his mother talking about their other work, their garden seiðr. There was just something soothing about knowing how the squash were coming in.

This time, though, his thoughts were wandering, and when a silence fell amid the chopping of potatoes and turnips and the soft bubbling of the soup on the fire, he found he needed to repeat his suspicions aloud, to hear what they both thought.

He told them about the strange young man who had promised to bring him rabbits just for the pleasure of his company.

Frigga paused in her chopping, looking shrewd. “He might indeed have been orphaned. But what that particularly sounds like to me is that he fancies you.”

Thor stiffened in surprise, face heating. “Mama!”

Sif, attending to the pot over the fire, shot him a grin. “She’s right, you know. That is how it sounds. But it also sounds like you might have a chance to tell him your theories yourself, if you want to.”

Thor’s brow knitted. “You don’t think he’ll really…”

“He might,” Sif said. “And I won’t complain if he does.”

Thor went back to carefully cleaning his catch, with their unexpected counsel resonating through his thoughts.


	3. Chapter 3

It was an incident that made its way into the local legends in the time after, and for good reason.

For those of us who had no inkling of Thor’s recent meetings with a stranger in the woods or the promises made to him, what happened came without warning or explanation. A portentous event that echoed old tales of doom and downfall, stories of how the last beasts to survive the endless winter would go mad, attempting to flee to warmer climes that were no more, trampling one another in the process.

When it began, it began with a low rustling, a deep rumbling that could be felt in the ground beneath our feet. It began with a blast of bitter cold air driving all manner of beasts before it, a great stag leading the way, bolting through the center of the village, its nostrils flaring wide, snorting white steam.

There were deer and elk of the woods, with antlers tall or spots still on their backs. Rams and wolves bolting side by side, eyes wild and tongues lolling, paying each other no notice as they zigged and zagged along their route, trying to be at the forefront of the mad scramble. Underfoot, rabbits and mice and squirrels and snowy white weasels ran leaping and bounding between other, larger scurrying hooves and paws.

When we saw, there was panic, folk running to and fro, not knowing what to do. Some rushed to put the solidity of a door between themselves and the chaos. Others ran for their hunting weapons. Others, awestruck, stood and stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, or shouted for their neighbors to look and see.

*

Thor stared in horror at the stampede thundering down the village lane, but at the same moment he heard Sif’s whoop of excitement as she shoved past him to grab bow and quiver from the front hall.

“Thor, come on!” she shouted. “This won’t last, this can’t last! Don’t just stand there!”

And then she was running out into the yard, mere paces away from where the mad rush passed in a blur, nocking an arrow as she moved, releasing it in the next instant, watching as her target fell into a tumble, more stumbling over it before the flow redirected around.

Thor could already see all the ruin that would come of this. Almost certainly, people would be hurt, or killed. Property would be destroyed as the larger beasts crashed through any structure in their path. And moreover, an unsettling thought was brewing in the back of Thor’s mind, making it all the more worrisome to see.

But on the other hand, Sif was right. So he grabbed his own bow and quiver, adding his spear as an afterthought, and went.

*

Hours later, the commotion had finally died down, but the cleanup had only begun.

The injured—of whom there were indeed a few, though not as many as Thor at first feared—were the first casualty to be attended to, their families and neighbors mostly helping them limp home, and the old healer, Eir, seeing to the ones who had gotten the worst of it.

And then there was the physical cleanup. Most of it, by necessity, would be left for the coming days, as it was impossible to repair everything before the day’s brief light left them. Some of it would probably take weeks to fix.

But other parts of what had to be done could not wait. The animals that had been brought down had already been collected, but now, to the greatest extent possible, they had to be cleaned and readied and stored, packed in salt or ice, or hung up for smoking.

Of their household, Thor had done most of the first and bloodiest parts with Sif sometimes beside him, and when it was mostly done, his mother had taken one look at his face, patted him on the arm, and told him to go rest, saying that she and Sif would finish what was left.

Briskly, Thor washed. He carried the basin of pinkish water outside to dump it, and left it empty on the step while he made his way to the outhouse (which thankfully had survived intact), and then back out into the yard, hands shoved in his pockets as he stared up at the twinkling stars.

The little question in the back of his mind had only grown, and now he was unsettled through and through.

And he heard softly crunching footsteps approaching, as he had thought he might.

When he looked up, Loki was standing there, a slight figure in the dark.

“Was that good enough?” he asked, sounding hopeful, eyes glittering.

Thor’s breath caught, and he thought of yelling many things back in the strange man’s face. How that was not at all what Thor had asked for, and how people had been hurt and could have died, and how did Loki dare to show up at his home in this way, without invitation.

Instead, his throat felt tight as he answered. “You did _not_ do that.”

Loki’s face went blank with surprise. “But I did! It wasn’t difficult, I told you it wouldn’t be.”

Into the quiet between them drifted the sounds of Sif’s voice and Frigga’s, talking together of all the things they would do with several hundred pounds of good meat.

Thor sighed. He didn’t really believe Loki was lying. He didn’t know _how_ Loki had done it, but he didn’t really doubt. Even though he wanted to.

“So was that good enough?” Loki repeated in the face of his quiet. “Do I get to look at you?”

Thor considered this. “Alright,” he said after a moment, and Loki’s face lit. “But… not right now. It’s late and I need sleep. Come back some other day and I’ll let you look as much as you want.”

Loki nodded, though he seemed confused and disappointed.

That night, Thor lay in bed unable to close his eyes.

It must have been all the creatures from miles around, and somehow Loki had driven them all at once, had guided them on a path to take them right to Thor’s door. Loki had done that, as he said, _easily._ And he had no inkling of how impossible it was or how dangerous or what might have come of it. He didn’t seem to realize any of that.

He was so odd, like he lived in an entirely different world. And he was doing all of this merely because he wanted to _look at_ Thor, or so he claimed.

Thor turned against his pillow, restless at the thought.

It was clear that Loki was no ordinary man, and Thor needed to know what sort of being it was that had come to fancy him.

*

The next day Thor went to see Mimir.

Mimir was one of the village elders, now; his hair gone grey and his body bent and frail although in truth he was not so old. The rumors said it was because of his visit to the seer; some said that anyone wishing to do so had to give up something and Mimir had chosen to sacrifice his youth.

Thor wasn’t sure that he believed those rumors, but he knew from his mother that Mimir had indeed made that journey, so that was whose help he needed.

He told Sif and his mother that he had an errand to run and that he was not sure when he would be back, and then he left.

Mimir’s house was on the far edge of the village. Thor had been there only a few times; his father had been friends with Mimir, yet Thor gathered that Frigga felt much less warmly toward him after Odin was killed.

He was a little hesitant as he knocked on the door, but it swung open before he had a chance to reconsider.

“Do you still remember the way to the seer?” Thor asked, gathering his determination, as the little grey-haired man eyed him.

*

Mimir did, and Thor was almost surprised when the man merely sighed and began draping himself in heavier furs, shoving a few items into a pack, grabbing his walking stick and knife.

“You might want to bring more than that,” Mimir said, eyeing him.

Thor had brought a bedroll and an oilskin for shelter, flint and steel for fire, a small axe, his hammer, his own knives, waterskin, a bowl and spoon, dried food for several days. An extra wool tunic and socks. His warmest hat and gloves, all thick and well lined, to go with the heavy coat he wore. He looked down at the sizeable pack that made, biting at his lip.

“Or you might not,” Mimir added with a beleaguered sigh.

“Why?” Thor asked. “What was it like last time? Is there anything I ought to know?”

“It won’t be the same. Doesn’t matter. Are you ready?”

“Yes, but—”

“If we’re going, let’s go.”

They slipped out of the village in the direction of the mountains, a lonesome and isolated route that Thor had never taken before, and a stone of anticipation settled in the bottom of his stomach.

For the first several hours of walking, grey gloom clinging to the hilly landscape, they barely spoke, and during that time Thor was thinking.

What would he ask the seer? He wasn’t sure at all what to expect. He wasn’t sure at all that the seer would have the answers he needed. But if not, he also wasn’t sure where else to turn.

“The beasts were unexpected,” Mimir said just as the sun began to go down, the day’s milder breeze beginning to grow teeth.

Thor looked at him questioningly.

“I assume your urgency to speak with the seer has something to do with that.”

Thor nodded.

“In a way I suppose it was a blessing, if dragging everything out a bit longer can be called that.”

That got Thor’s attention. “Dragging everything out?”

Mimir stared off at the horizon, the watery spread of color as the sun touched the jagged line of the far forest. “Hope is a dangerous thing. You’re too young to see that, and I’m sorry that you’ll probably have to learn it. You don’t remember how things were before, do you?”

“No,” Thor replied. “I was only just born the last time there was summer.”

“Ah, yes, I remember.” Mimir gave him a crooked smile. “Born at the end of it, too. Your mother and father had both been trying for a child for some time. I wonder if they would have tried so hard if they knew what sort of world you’d have to live in.”

Thor gave an uncertain murmur, not knowing quite how to respond to such a thing.

Fortunately, Mimir shrugged and said no more about it.

They continued to walk for a while in silence, the cold growing deeper in time with the greyish violet of the sky.

“So are you going to tell me why we’re making this journey?” Mimir asked as the white moon rose, its light sparkling and glittering on the snow and casting black shadows behind their two shapes.

Thor thought of Loki and felt suddenly awkward. _“I met a peculiar stranger who sent all the beasts through our village to impress me, and I want to know what he really is”_ did not seem the sort of thing he ought to say.

“It is as you said. It’s to do with the beasts, and with this winter, and… I think I should save my questions for the seer, if we find him at all.”

*

They kept walking until exhaustion overcame them, and then they set up Thor’s small tent, not bothering with a fire for the few hours of rest they would take.

Thor was almost asleep when he heard it.

“Psst!”

Bleary-eyed, he pushed himself up onto his elbows and glanced around.

Mimir was already snoring quietly beside him, but Thor swore he had heard something, so he clambered down to the flap of the tent and peered out.

And sure enough, Loki was crouching nearby, his pale legs practically glowing in the moonlight.

“It is some other day,” he said. “Please, Thor. Can I look at you now?”

Thor only gaped at him. “How did you find me?”

Loki’s eyes were harder to read in the darkness, the icy pools now deeper, but he gave Thor what seemed to be a pleased look. “You’re always easy to find, now that I’ve seen you.”

Thor had no clue what this meant, only that it frightened him, for reasons he could not grasp.

“Loki, it’s the middle of the night.”

Loki blinked and looked around at the darkness, as if seeing it for the first time. Somewhere nearby an owl hooted.

“Oh. And so you… _sleep_ … now?”

Thor sighed. “I try to, at least.”

Loki’s face brightened into a smile at this. “Is there any way I can help?”

Thor remembered a stampede of the wilderness through his village, the exhaustion of butchering at least a year’s worth of meat that followed, that had been the end result of Loki’s _help_.

“No,” he said, as firmly as he could. “I will be just fine on my own.”

“May I watch you while you sleep, then?”

“No!”

Even in the dark, Loki’s disappointment was palpable.

“We can talk for a few minutes, though, if you want,” Thor amended.

Eagerly, Loki nodded.

*

A little while later, when Loki had (thankfully) left again, Thor lay back against his thin pillow and stared up at the dark canvas.

They hadn’t talked of anything important. He’d let Loki ask the questions, and all of them had been strange. _“Who gave you your name?” “What makes her your mother? Do you have only one of them?” “What happens if you don’t sleep?”_ But he had tried to answer, tried to keep the baffled shock out of his voice when he did.

He didn’t know what it was about Loki. Everything about him was unnerving, yet Thor didn’t want to upset him. Thor hated to see him sad, and he had no idea why. It was more than just general compassion, surely.

And he also could no longer deny that he had felt a little thrill when Loki was there just outside the tent, looking for him. Wanting to see him. He didn’t know why that feeling was there beneath the nervousness and dread and uneasiness, but it was.

In his head, he heard his mother’s voice again. _“It sounds like he fancies you.”_

He remembered the sight of bare legs and graceful hands as Loki sat by the door of the tent, gaze intense whenever their eyes met. He remembered the soft curiosity of Loki’s voice, as if Thor were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.

He wondered if he fancied Loki as well, at least a little bit.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, folks! The rest shouldn't take as long. Thanks for sticking around, and thanks to those who have let me know you're enjoying this so far!

It was only two more days to reach the seer, though in that time Thor had realized that he perhaps ought to have been worried there would be no one left there to find; if the man had been old already almost twenty years ago, he would be ancient now. And he had been living alone in the wilderness, a situation that not many would have survived.

Yet there it was, a small shack in a clearing with a little ribbon of blue smoke rising from its roof as evidence that there was still someone within it, and Mimir beside him nodded and gave his confirmation.

“So why were you gone three weeks when you were here before?”

Mimir gave a grumble that Thor barely managed to piece together as “Don’t ask.”

“Did… something happen that time?”

Mimir shot him a sharp glance at that. “Of course something happened.”

Thor waited, perplexed.

“I got lost,” Mimir growled at last. “Not all of us have the benefit of having someone to show us the way, you know. But we’re here now, anyway, so let’s get on with it. Let’s go see what he’ll tell you.”

*

The interior of the shack was darkened from years of smoke, and the smell of it hung heavy in the air. There was a faint light only from the embers of a round fireplace set in the center of the floor; there were no windows, only the door and the vent in the ceiling to let the smoke out. There was a sense of clutter in the shadows, of bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters, of bones and bowls and other odd things.

At the seer’s silent gesture, Thor sat down on the rough wood floor facing the glow of the embers, staring across into the seer’s scarred old face, the wolf’s pelt over his shoulders, the fur of its snout draped down over the tip of his grey hairline. In the corner of his eye he could see Mimir gingerly sitting down a little bit away, but he paid no attention.

His own nerves were awakening, his shoulders tense and his heart pounding with the thought of what he might soon learn.

The seer continued to regard him in silence, and after some interminable time had passed, he leaned forward, pinched a bit of some dusty substance from the bowl by his foot, and tossed it on the embers, blowing through wrinkled lips as he did so, and the fire, when it leapt, seemed no longer an ordinary fire. The red of its licking flames was redder. The blue where it consumed its fuel was brighter. The expression on the seer’s face seemed to shift as the fire danced. Stern, amused, patient, weary...

“What questions do you ponder?” the seer asked, and it was the first time Thor had heard his voice. “What answers have you come for?”

Thor had been thinking about that ever since Mimir had asked him, and ever since Loki had come to find him in the night.

He wanted to know what Loki was. And that was what he had meant to ask when they set out. But as they’d traveled, he’d started to feel strange about it. Walking beside Mimir through the snow, leaving his village behind under the low grey sky, the cold upon his skin… it had begun to feel like a frivolous question. Something too unimportant to bother the seer with. Something he’d be a little bit ashamed to ask in front of someone who had made the same journey twenty years ago to find out what had caused the whole world to go cold.

And also, now, sitting here in the seer’s shack, before the flickering fire and the old man’s impenetrable gaze… Thor found he couldn’t make himself say Loki’s name to people who had never seen him, who didn’t know the sound of his soft footfalls in the snow.

So Thor hesitated. He stared into the flickering flames, their heat just beginning to thaw his cold fingers, his cold toes, and he glanced up at Mimir (who was still watching him with one critical eyebrow raised) and back to the seer, waiting patiently.  

“Something happened in the village,” Thor murmured, because that seemed like the place where he should begin anyway. That was why he’d come. So he told in a few awkward, hurried words what had happened with the stampede of beasts.

The seer’s eyes glinted, knowing, in the firelight.

“That was part of the old tales of what would happen at the end, though, wasn’t it? Does that mean that we are nearing the end?”

The seer nodded, slowly, and Thor was aware of Mimir’s exhalation near him, and the buzzing in his own head, but he tried to shake it aside. That wasn’t the question he had wanted to ask, it wasn’t the answer he had sought.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Not while the summer spirit is gone,” the seer answered.

And that made Thor pause, blinking. The story he had heard all his life had said that the summer was _dead_. What Thor had just heard did not sound nearly as final as that.

And the question he wanted to ask sprang into his head, onto his tongue.

“Tell me _why_ the summer spirit is gone,” Thor said, urgent. “Why the Fimbulwinter began. Tell me what _happened_.”

Silence followed, the flames crackling like a whisper. And then the seer began to laugh, low and thin and soft.

“Ahh. _Why,_ indeed. The only question that matters, yet so often they fail to ask it.”

There was a quiet, offended sound from where Mimir sat. But Thor did not move, did not flinch as the seer looked him up and down, firelight flickering on his face.

“Very well,” the seer said at last. “I will give you the answers you seek. The first thing you must know is this: the spirits of summer and winter were brothers.”

 

_The Seer’s Tale_

_Long ago, when the world began, it began with their clash, their rivalry. You have heard the tales—the grinding ice and the burning fire, meeting in a swirl of storm in Ginnungagap._

_That was the first meeting of those two spirits, those two siblings, born from nothing together in the morning of the world. That meeting was a violent one, except the word had no meaning. There was nothing against which to judge it, and nothing yet existed for their violence to destroy. They strove against each other with force, yet neither could harm or be harmed, thus it was endless._

_Only as time went on did any order come into their combat. When the solid ground of the world had been shaped and they no longer grappled against each other bodiless in the void, boundaries between them were formed, and each took his own season to rule. Yet always where they met, they fought._

_The ice and snow of winter were destroyed each spring, melting into the ground and flowing into streams and rivers, becoming water with no memory of its former stillness._

_And in fall, the heat and growth of summer fell to the encroaching touch of ice once more, the ground going fallow, silent, asleep._

_And each revived in due time and began it all again._

_It was a fruitful cycle of death and rebirth, for those of us who live in the mortal world._

_For those two spirits, it was a struggle with no end, no peace, no respite._

_No end except in one final way: for one to be defeated, to fall, and this time not to rise again. To perish._

_And that is what came to pass. There came a season when their eternal battle ended with the summer spirit's defeat. And now his brother reigns alone, his cold unchecked. Even if he chose to spare the world, he could not. It is not within his power._

_Not his alone._

*

The seer fell silent, the light of the embers still shifting in his dark eyes until he closed them, wrinkled lids covering their piercing glance.

The tale felt heavy in Thor’s chest.

“So the winter spirit killed his brother?” he asked after several minutes had passed.

“He did and he did not,” the seer answered without moving, without opening his eyes. “The winter spirit had killed his brother every year, just as the summer spirit arose again and defeated him each spring. But this time, instead of rising once more, the summer spirit closed his eyes of his own will and departed from the realm in which he and his brother had always dwelt.”

Mimir let out a grunt of annoyance from beyond the edge of their circle, where he had been listening unnoticed. “You misled me. You didn’t tell me that part.”

“You did not ask the right questions.”

Mimir grumbled at that but said no more.

But Thor was frowning, the story settling into his mind—and it was incomplete there, with gaping, shadowy holes that he struggled to fill, thoughts racing, imagination running wild.

“Where did he go?” Thor asked, fumbling the words out, stuttering. “The summer… if he left… where did he…?”

The seer’s eyes fixed on Thor’s. “That we cannot know.”

“You must know something!”

The seer shrugged. “I know that many things are possible. He could have been born into the mortal world to become forgetful of his past and his true self and whatever hurts he suffered. Or perhaps he has dwindled and become merely a wisp, a moment’s delight of sun in winter when he passes near. And it is also possible that he is truly gone from this world. Whichever it is, having fled… it seems unlikely that he means ever to return.”

*

Thor felt oddly bruised as he picked himself up carefully from the hard floor after minutes had passed in deep silence. His eyes watered as he tried to make sense of all he had heard. Across from him, Mimir seemed far more collected as they prepared to depart again, gathering up his own things without a word.

Fastening his coat again with shaky fingers, Thor turned to the seer, thinking anxiously of Mimir’s grey hair and the potential price for the answers he’d received.

“Um, is there anything I owe you for your tales?”

The seer shook his head. “The price for this knowledge will not be paid to me, and I think you are the kind who will not seek to shirk it.”

Grateful, Thor nodded, and he hefted his pack. Mimir was by then waiting by the door. But just as Thor turned to follow, the seer halted him with a gesture, beckoning him near.

“You did not ask your other question,” he said, mouth quirking with hidden humor and voice low without seeming to try to keep Mimir from hearing. “But I will answer it anyway: it is possible for the spirit of winter to appear in the form of a man. And such a being would seem strange to us indeed.”

Thor’s mouth hung open.

The seer gave him a shrug, and his grey brow twitched at the faint shuffle of Mimir’s impatience behind Thor.

“Go now, summer’s son,” he said, “and be not afraid.”

*

Thor was silent and lost in thought as they began the trek back to the village.

_The spirit of winter could appear in the form of a man_. The seer had said that, without Thor asking. Without Thor so much as mentioning Loki or any of the things that had happened between them.

But Thor found that the words hadn’t actually surprised him. It felt oddly like he had known it already and just had it confirmed, something too hard to believe without hearing it spoken by someone else.

Loki was the winter spirit. His strange admirer, who’d sent the beasts bolting through the village for him. Who wanted to look at him, who had sought him out and said he could always see where Thor was.

It made sense. And knowing now what Loki was, when Thor thought of the strange, thin, pale young man he’d met each time in the snow, his heart thudded in his chest. He felt both hot and cold at once, the ghosts of the seer’s fire on his skin and the bluster of the air as they walked homeward. He shivered with a feeling for which he had no name.

But he had also heard the rest of the tale now, and that changed things. It changed what Thor felt, the way the snow blew and drifted around him.

The lost look Loki had worn sometimes, the aura of loneliness…

Tears pricked in Thor’s eyes as he trudged along. But it wasn’t just sadness he felt. The tears were hot. His insides squirmed.  

As they walked, Thor’s toes were cold in his boots in a way he’d rarely noticed before. He kicked through the snow drifts, the grey sky feeling heavy and threatening above him. The ice gleaming as a silver coat upon the bare black branches—the day before, he would have found it lovely. But now it felt foreign, each sight and sound and sensation scraping unpleasantly inside him like a frozen crust of snow, sparkling but treacherous. It made him shudder and tug his coat tighter around him.

The tale he’d heard… the reason why the winter spirit was now alone…

“Thor, are you well?” Mimir asked, sounding more annoyed than concerned.

“No. I’m not.”

He wasn’t, eyes burning and his chest beginning to ache.

And to make matters worse, the wind was picking up, lashing sharp, sparkling flecks of ice at his cheeks and whipping at his hair, making him duck his head.

It was going to be a long walk home.


	5. Chapter 5

“Mama, would you tell me what the last summer was like?”

Thor felt awkward asking it—the things they had all lost to the endless winter seemed to be a sore spot for those old enough to remember them—but he needed to know. Ever since his return from the seer, he’d been wondering many things about the past, about what had really happened, the truth that filled the gaps in the tale. And in this way, he might find some answers.

So he had shuffled into the parlor this evening to find his mother curled up before the fire, a blanket over her legs and a book upon her lap, a loose grey-blonde curl against her cheek seeming to waver in the flickering light. He’d sat down beside her, quiet at first, but it hadn’t been long before she turned to him and clasped his hand in hers.

When he’d first gotten home, he’d been grateful to sink into her embrace as soon as the door closed behind him, shutting out the howling wind, but he hadn’t told her the entire story. He’d told her about the summer and the winter being brothers, and how the summer spirit had apparently chosen to die. But he’d left out the part about Loki—about his strange admirer being the winter spirit—because he hadn’t wanted her to worry for him any more than she already did.

But that meant now that she turned her head to gaze at him, eyes shrewd, when he asked about how things used to be, about the season that he had never seen.

“Was it any different from the summers before?”

Frigga considered this. “A bit different, yes. I remember thinking it was hotter, but I also remember everyone said that most years. And I certainly remember the storms.”

“Storms?”

“Oh yes,” she said with a fond smile, gazing into memory. “They were fearsome, but I didn’t mind. I had always liked summer storms, even when it meant worrying that the lanes would flood or that the herdsmen would lose sheep to the fright of the thunder. On the hottest days, when the air seemed thick and heavy, you had but to wait for the evening and the sky would seem to break open, drenching the earth below. It always made me feel like a small thing in the presence of something vast and powerful.”

Thor had, of course, only ever experienced winter storms. But he thought he knew what feeling she meant. Like watching black snow clouds sweeping across the far-off peaks and knowing that the flashes of white within them meant a blizzard, meant heavy snow falling like an avalanche upon mountain slopes, meant darkness and cold and the dreadful silence beneath, and watching as that heavy darkness came ever closer.

His mother squeezed his hand again, bringing him back to himself.

“There were many of them that summer. We didn’t see any significance to it. In those days, there was no reason to think on it much deeper than chance, or to suspect that the outcome would be anything worse than a hard season.”

Thor nodded, contemplative, and his mother watched him.

“I don’t think anyone suspected a thing, though maybe we should have,” she added.

Thor made a soft sound, lost in thought. An angry, tormented summer. A summer full of storms. And then the summer was gone.

*

That night, as he curled up in his own bed, Thor could not stop thinking about _why_ the summer had gone. Really, he had not stopped thinking about it since he’d left the seer’s shack, but for the most part he had managed to push the thoughts to the back of his mind.

Now, alone in the hush, snow falling outside his window, he could no longer ignore it.

Now, he closed his eyes and envisioned two vague shapes swirling against each other, fighting and struggling and striving, and he thought of what it must have been like for the summer spirit to fight his brother for eternity.

_Imagine having to fight your brother forever so that the cycle of seasons would turn… imagine killing your brother and being killed, too many times to count…_  

Thor’s brows squeezed together, the hollow feeling taking over his insides again. He had not ever had a sibling (well, Sif, though she had only come to live with them a few years before, when her own parents had died), but the thought filled him with horror. He could barely imagine it.

But even so, it had to be more than just that, because the summer spirit had endured that for centuries. Millennia. For a span of time so long that Thor could surely not comprehend it at all. So something must have happened, something that had made the summer spirit give up and let go.

Thor was half dozing, his imaginings on the verge of turning into unsettled dreams. But they were not dreams. They were more real than that, and they were filled with details the seer had not told him: he watched the bodies of the summer and winter spirits as they battled, phantomlike, jolting against each other and slipping through each other like mists, a swirl of seasons all around them, ruddy summer gold made of light and color, pale and shadowy ice blue. All of it was together, part of the same thing, but distant. The changes flowed out from them unnoticed.

But that was the larger sphere around them. When he focused on the two figures at the center, taking in the details, the ebb and flow… he found himself watching, helpless, as their battles grew harsher, the winter turning vicious. The summer fought back with fire and ferocity at first, but the winter only grew colder in response, battering the summer with blows that seemed to stun him, laughing all the while like the shriek of grinding ice. Thor watched as the summer tried to protect himself, curling around his injuries, roaring back with greater anger through his pain.

Early on the summer had hesitated now and then, outstretched toward his sibling, but in the end that stopped, and some of the richness went out of the summer light, becoming a brassy glare.

And then—

Thor knew what happened then, even as his eyes blinked open in the darkness, the tears pooling in them cold. He had grown up knowing the cruelty and caprice of winter. It shouldn’t surprise him that the winter had grown too cruel for even his brother to endure. And the summer had fled to escape him.

Thor lay there shivering, and he was faintly aware of the whistle of the bitter wind outside.

None of that should surprise him. But now when he thought of winter, he saw in his head not frost and snow but a pale, thin young man in a blue tunic, an odd, hopeful look upon his face, light glinting in his ice-green eyes.

So Loki had caused this. Loki had caused misery and starvation and deaths in the cold, for the entire length of Thor’s life. The winter had driven the summer away. And now he wandered the world as if his loneliness were not his own fault. He chased after a human as if he had done nothing wrong, and as if nothing _were_ wrong. As if he had any right.

Thor, burning with anger and loathing and with a wish that he had not liked Loki for even a single moment, clenched his jaw and pulled the blankets up around his ears, burying himself in the warm hollow beneath them, and when sleep finally did come, it came as a relief.

*

In the days that followed, Thor threw himself into working.

No one would need to hunt for quite some time. There were no traps to check. But that was just as well, because he didn’t really want to be by himself out in the woods now anyway; Loki had so far only appeared to him when he was alone.

And there was plenty of other work to be done. Repairs to various structures around the village, work where strong backs were welcome, work that didn’t take much thought, just fortitude and persistence. So Thor was there every morning, waking in the thin, grey light to go out to find which of his neighbors needed help that day, then spending hours hammering nails into boards, or going along with the others to bring more wood, hauling the logs back in groups of three or four, spending hours splitting and cutting them.

All around him, there was the ongoing buzz of talk and chatter, people he’d known all his life. People he had relied upon and who had relied upon him, people who had helped one another through the unending winter. Most were distant kin of his, of one sort or another. Their presence was comforting.

He himself was mostly quiet, though, sweat rolling down his sides beneath his coat, and despite the effort of his exertions he couldn’t keep his mind from straying out from the village, into the wilderness. Into another realm entirely, where the spirits of summer and winter had dwelt.

His visions the other night… he wasn't sure where they had come from, but he didn’t doubt them.

He was less sure why the idea upset him so. Probably what he should have felt was fear; he was just a man, and the spirit of winter was a being far beyond his ken, powerful and ancient. To have caught his eye… that should have been frightening. And it was.

But mostly, a bitter, betrayed anger burned in Thor’s chest each time he thought of how Loki had caused all this. Fury that Loki had done that to his brother and didn't seem to care.

A little bit of it also was anger that Loki had, by omission, deceived him, making Thor begin to care for him without knowing the truth.

As he worked, anger pouring off him like steam, he glanced over his shoulder anxiously at each crunch of snow, startled at each unexpected footstep and whirled around with fists clenched, but it was never Loki. Just the other men of the village, or occasionally the wind or nothing at all.

*

Almost a month passed with no sign of Loki.

But it couldn’t last forever, no matter how hard Thor tried to stay perpetually in the company of others, or else closed up within the house, the winter cold all around but unable to touch him.

One morning, it was unavoidable, his mother asking him to run a message over to a neighbor just after he woke, as the sun was rising. So Thor cut across the snowy fields, noticing the beauty of the pale colors in the sky and the tranquility of the quiet all around, and the cold was only brisk, not brutal.

He should not have been surprised to come up to the rough wood fence on his way back and turn to find Loki approaching, the near-silent crunch of fur boots through the fresh, powdery snow. He still wore the same thin blue tunic as well, and his midnight hair was wind-tossed and tangled, though the air was now still.

Thor gritted his teeth and huffed a breath. “I thought you were gone for good,” he said—a little nastily, in a tone that said he would not have minded it being true, but Loki didn’t seem to notice.  

“I’m sorry it took so long. I was trying to think of a present to bring you but I didn’t know what you would want,” Loki said, peering back at him. “I thought if I brought you more gifts, better gifts, you might want to let me touch you as well.”

“And what made you think that?” Anger tasted bitter in Thor’s throat, and he could not keep it quashed down.

Loki shifted on his feet, nervous, mouth slack. “But then I thought I should ask you first, since you weren’t pleased last time… so will you tell me what you would like?”

Thor’s eyes narrowed at being ignored. “No.”

“Please?” Loki said. “It’s just that I very much want to know you.”

Thor frowned. “What?”

“I very much want to—”

“I heard you,” Thor snapped. “What do you _mean_?”

At that, Loki looked briefly flummoxed, eyes flashing to Thor’s and away again. “Um… what do creatures like you do with those you desire?”

Thor stared. Loki could not mean what he thought he meant.

No, he very obviously did.

“We… we make love,” Thor stuttered.

But Loki shook his head. “No, I already love you. What is the thing you _do_?”

Such a conversation was enough to drive Thor mad, and he clenched his jaw and forced himself to answer rather than turning on his heel and walking away as he fervently wanted to do. And he hoped he wasn’t blushing as much as it felt like he was. Or at least that Loki wouldn’t know what that meant, or would mistake it for a flush from the brisk winds.

“ _Making love_ is just an expression. It’s… sex. We have sex.”

Loki brightened. “You mean, the same way the goats in your barn do?”

If Thor had not already been blushing, he almost certainly was now. “More or less,” he mumbled.

Loki gave him a pleased grin. “Well, then, I would very much like to have sex with you.”

Thor stared at him dumbfounded, so Loki continued, still smiling.

“What gift shall I bring you for that?”

“None!” Thor shouted. “That’s not how it works!”

“But I could get you almost anything you want. I’m very powerful, I can do many things…”

Loki stood there, pleading and still hopeful, and Thor couldn’t stand it.

“Then make the winter stop,” he snarled. “If you do that, you can look at me and touch me and _know_ me, anything, I don’t care. Just make the winter stop.”

In the snowy silence that fell, Loki looked at him, crestfallen.

“I can’t…”

Thor’s bitter anger rose again, hot inside him but deadly calm.

“Then I don’t want to see you anymore.”

The sadness in Loki’s eyes twisted and shattered, but by then Thor had already turned away and stormed back inside.


	6. Chapter 6

Overnight, the winter grew worse.

For those of us who had no idea what had transpired between Thor and the winter spirit, it happened suddenly, without warning or reason. The wet, heavy snow began to pour down from dark skies, vengeful, as if it meant to finally bury us all. Roofs creaked under the weight of it, threatening collapse.

In dread we huddled together, trying to hold onto what little warmth and hope we could. The roads became treacherous and then impassable; even a neighbor’s cottage was soon much too far away, and we were all glad our larders had so recently been filled.

All we could do was wait.

And where the storm halted, it was replaced with worse, with cold so bitter it could snuff out a fire in the hearth. Bare toes dipping out from under blankets froze white in the night.

Where fires went out, some did not wake at all.

We did not know why the weather had turned, only that it had reached the limit of what we could endure, and there was yet no end in sight.

*

When Thor woke, the storm was just beginning. In the night the snow had begun to fall, and by dawn it was already thicker on the ground than it had been in some time.

Something sank in the pit of Thor’s stomach as he looked out his window, the distance blurred and hazy from the falling flakes.

Clearly, Loki was upset. But what else had he expected? Thor could not believe that Loki had come and asked to be… _intimate_ with him. Had tried to _buy_ his affections. It had been insulting—would have been even if it hadn’t come from someone Thor was already angry with.

But still, as he watched the snow falling thick and swift, he wondered whether he had made a terrible mistake. The storm would do harm whether it was deliberate vengeance or just the winter spirit’s overflowing emotion. It could kill whether Thor had been in the right or not.

He would just have to do what he could, now.

He began preparing as swiftly as possible, going into the kitchen only long enough to take a steaming mug of tea from the kettle and gulp it down to get something warm inside him, and a few more minutes to tell his mother that he feared the worst of this storm and that he meant to bring the goats in.

Frigga raised a brow at him. “Really? It hasn’t been that bad in ages.”

Thor just nodded and didn’t explain, shrugging on his coat and shoving open the door before she could think to ask him why he thought so.

Outside the air was grey and the wind sharp, and the blowing snow caught in his hair and melted on his cheeks.

The goats he led inside first, guiding them into the small back room that was mostly used for extra storage space when it wasn’t used for goats. Then after they were safely bleating in their pen, straw beneath their hooves, he ventured back out and around the side of the barn to where the pile of firewood waited. It would be too far away if worst came to worst. So armful by armful, he hauled the split wood to the spot just inside the back doorway, stacking it there until it was nearly as high as his head.

By then it was mid-morning, and the wind and the sky and the snow had convinced Frigga that the storm might indeed turn bad. And nearly as soon as Thor had warmed, standing with his fingers over the little stove in the kitchen, she had set him a list of errands to run, messages and magical charms to carry to neighboring houses while he still could.

He waded back, through snow that was just past knee-deep and growing deeper by the hour, as the hidden sun began to traverse down the sky.  

And as the door shut behind him again and a relative calm descended after the frantic work of the day, Thor couldn’t stop himself from again thinking about the reason for it all.

When he fed the goats that evening, he felt his face heating as he looked at the old pair and recalled the comparison Loki had made.

But still. Perhaps he had been a little too harsh, though Loki undoubtedly deserved it. Loki’s blinking confusion when Thor refused him—Thor couldn’t help but feel the tiniest twinge of guilt over that.

So just before bedtime, Thor bundled up again and stepped outside, just beyond the door where the snow was still somewhat tramped down from his earlier passage, and he stood there with his arms around himself. There was a faint moonlight glow, and the wind had died down enough that the big flakes were simply falling soft and steady, and there was a hush filled with only faint whispers, indistinct voices inside or perhaps the sound of owls’ wings.

“Loki?” Thor said, breath puffing white. He didn’t say it loudly. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to succeed in summoning him, but he felt he had to make the attempt. The storm would become dangerous. He owed it to everyone else to try.

“Loki? I’m sorry… I didn’t mean it…”

It was a half-hearted plea, and there came no footsteps from the grey night, no movements in the dark.

Thor waited a few more minutes, hands stuffed in his pockets to keep them warm.

“Could you make the storm stop, at least?” he asked, a little petulant.

And the answer, again, was silence.

Thor went back inside.

*

The storm didn’t stop.

For days it went on, wind rising and falling, cold deepening, and the snow on the ground growing deeper. Soon, there was no hope of going more than a few paces through it.

There was nowhere to go, and there, closed up in his mother’s house, there was little to do, and even less for Thor than for his mother and Sif; while they expended their energy keeping the growing things alive, he had taken over nearly all the other chores, cooking and washing and taking care of the goats and tending to the fire.

He was restless by the end of the second day. At the end of a week, he was practically frantic. He needed distraction. He needed something different to do, some change in the sights before his eyes.

His mother was surprised to find him waiting by the greenhouse door the next morning, saying that he wished to be put to work within.

Frigga frowned. “Are you sure? You’ve never much liked it before.”

It was true that he hadn’t. Always he had felt vaguely uncomfortable in the greenhouse, as if he were intruding on someone else’s space. It had always been so completely his mother’s domain, and then Sif’s as well, and… there had never seemed to be room for him. And when he tried anyway, he had no knack for it at all. So he had kept away, only venturing inside on the rare occasions when they needed his help in shifting some of the heaviest of the planting boxes.

But that day it didn’t matter, the need for novelty stronger than any of those feelings, and Thor shrugged. And soon he stood within, between two carefully tended rows of green, breathing the warmer air thick with the damp and the scents of growing things. The feeling of it was welcome on his skin.

Sif, too, looked at him with shock when she joined them, but as soon as he explained, she started telling him what to do, sending him around the room to help out with anything that didn’t require knowledge of spellwork.

Hours passed among the rows of pots, from which sprung tall stalks with delicate hairs soft and silvery on their sides, or bulbous roots with dull, firm purple-white skins peeking over the top of the soil beneath sprawling deep-green leaves with red veins. Or over at one wall, a row of new, young plants only a few inches high.

He had noticed them in passing, and while Sif and Frigga were busy on the other side of the room, he crouched down to peer at them, to let his finger just barely trace the green leaves unfolding, sticky, from their stems.

He wondered whether they would become lettuces or carrots or leeks or something else, and he thought of how astonishing it was that they could flourish here with only the faint sun to reach them through the frosted glass, only the magic from the little book, from Sif and Frigga’s hands, to nourish them. He tried to imagine what that would be like, to see the little green heads turning toward him, to feel them growing in response to his touch.

The thought warmed him, and he blinked against the dampness in his eyes. It would be even better to see things growing everywhere, wild and vibrant under open skies, but he could hardly envision it, and most likely no one would ever see such a thing again.

Then Sif shouted for him, and with a sigh he stood and continued on.

He might not have thought about it again if he had not been peeling potatoes with Sif for supper that evening when his mother emerged from the greenhouse, brow knitted.

“Sif, have you been working on the sprouts along the south wall?”

Thor looked up, tongue still, taking in the confusion that spread across Sif’s face.

“No,” she answered. “You were tending to those, weren’t you? What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s _wrong_. It’s just that I could have sworn they were little more than shoots yesterday. They’re much taller than they should be today. I thought perhaps you had tried something new with them.”

Thor barely breathed. The planter along the south wall… the sticky green leaves...

Sif only shrugged. “I haven’t. Thor, did you do anything?”

“You know I can’t.” His voice sounded thin to his own ears, over the repetitive snick of the knife. “I don’t have your talent.”

“You weren’t messing about with spells out of the book  or anything?” Sif said it with a teasing laugh, but he could only shake his head. He didn’t look at either of them, head down over the bowl of peeled potatoes. He could hear his own heartbeat.

After a moment, Frigga made a contemplative noise. “How odd. Perhaps I’m misremembering.”

Those had been the ones he’d touched.

But it could not be because of him. It could not. He hadn’t done anything.

*

That night the snow stopped, but only because it grew too cold for any more to fall.

The wind still blew, making it feel colder still, and it skipped along the top of the snow, which had drifted up against the buildings in frozen, stubborn billows.

The cold crept in, and Thor built up the fire, having volunteered to stay up to make sure it did not go out.

The rest of the house went dark and quiet as first his mother and then Sif disappeared down the hallway to their rooms, and there was nothing else for Thor to do but think.

He had been trying not to be afraid as the days passed in storm. He had been trying not to feel that it was his fault. He had even ventured outside once more to whisper Loki’s name up at the dark sky and try to plead with him, though that attempt had been even briefer than the first.

But now, in the hush, the fire crackling before him seeming the only lively thing left in the world, the guilt rose.

Guilt and dread, and worry for everyone else in the village.

But it itched in the back of his mind. It was guilt because he had spurred Loki into this. But part of him protested at that, and the guilt felt too large for that to be the cause.

Thor huffed out a breath, leaning on his knees, staring into the endless shifting patterns of the flames.

He wished Loki had never seen him, had never taken notice of him and become infatuated. Then none of this would have happened, and Thor would not have to feel responsible for the storm. It would just be a winter storm.

For that matter, _why_ had Loki had noticed him, out of all the people in the world? There was no reason that Thor could see. Loki had seemed fascinated by his hair, his coloring—but those were hardly so rare.  

So that was yet another thing to bother him, another unanswered question, like the green leaves unfolding at his touch and the seer calling him summer’s son.

And the nameless guilt looming over him for no reason that made sense. It wasn’t his fault. The things that were happening—he hadn’t caused them. He hadn’t _forced_ the winter spirit to do this. But his conscience didn’t seem to know that.  

Unsettled, he watched the fire burn low, and he reached for another log or two, the bark crumbling under his fingers, and he arranged them and watched as the fire caught, licking up their sides with new enthusiasm. He jabbed the poker irritably at one of them to settle it better, sending sparks flying upward into the flue. After one particularly vicious jab, the burning wood gave a sudden pop and an ember flew back, striking Thor’s hand, making him cry out.

It wasn’t a bad burn, but it was the sort of small pain that makes the entire world seem darker, and he rubbed at his hand, tears springing into his eyes.

He hated this guilt. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t, because he’d had every right to leave after all the things his brother had done to him. And then Loki had just found him again _anyway_ , and Thor could not be blamed for how he’d reacted. It was Loki’s fault that he—

Thor stopped, fingers going still on the little burn, breath stuck in his throat as he caught up to his own racing thoughts. He blinked as he realized what they meant.

He _remembered_. But…

But it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be real, and he shoved the thought away from himself so forcefully it hurt. He was just an ordinary man, and he did not _remember_ what it had felt like to be summer. That would be ridiculous. It wasn’t possible.

And yet it remained there, a dense fog of memories so heavy that his head hurt. Pressing upon his mind with the weight of everything he had refused to see.

_The little green leaves…_  

Thor shut his eyes, prodding carefully at what he remembered, trying to see the shape of it all. Firelight and shadows flickered like phantoms through the lids until he covered them with his hands. He was breathing fast, head light, blood pounding behind his eyes.

The memories were full of fighting and hurting, the same as the half-awake dream visions from before, except this time he was not watching from the outside. He was remembering being in the middle of it, the battle between him and his brother growing more vicious, the pain and hopelessness becoming unbearable.

And now he remembered why that was. Such a simple thing.

He remembered coming to believe that his brother no longer loved him. Nothing else had seemed to matter after that.

He could have endured the pain and the fighting and the chaos forever if he’d only believed that Loki still felt anything for him. If he hadn’t been sure that his brother had gone cold to him.

And now, just days ago, Loki had tried to insist that he loved him… but he hadn’t known who he was speaking to. Thor was sure of that. Loki had been treating him as a stranger all this time. Loki hadn’t known it was him, and a little flush of hurt jealousy sprang up in Thor’s chest at the thought that Loki’s affections were so fickle. That he could find a random mortal to love after Thor was gone.

… Thor wondered if he was being slightly unfair.

Maybe Loki didn’t understand his own feelings. And maybe he really was mourning, lonely without the summer. Maybe that was why he was playing at being a human, wandering in the cold.

Maybe Thor had been wrong from the start.

He thought about this while the fire burned low again, letting the chill encroach, the fading warmth buffeting against his shins while cold licked at his back and slipped icy fingers within his garments.

Under the same roof but farther from the fire, in his mother’s bedroom, the winter was surely barely kept at bay, and Thor thought of his mother alone in the big bed—he had vague memories of sleeping beside her upon it with the coverlet snug up to his chin when he was very small. Just the two of them, his father long dead and gone, lost to the first ravages of this endless winter.

Behind the other door, Sif was probably just at that moment huddled under a thick blanket, feet against heated stones and mind far away, losing herself in the tales of bravery and adventure that she had loved since childhood and which were now nothing more to her than stolen dreams. Perhaps the little candle flame was wavering from cold on the bedside table, making the inked words shiver as well.

Across the village, others were surely doing likewise, doing all they could to endure, but if this went on, eventually the cold would take them in its grip.

And it was happening because he was here. Because he had fled, leaving the world to fall into the grip of eternal winter.

Surely he had cared about that when he was summer. Surely he had known what would happen because of it. But he remembered knowing it as a distant and unimportant consequence. All the lives of the world had seemed small and far away—he’d barely known what humans were, tiny and brief and flitting, mere specks upon the world—and the hurts he suffered were huge and present. He had just been too exhausted from fighting, too heartsick.

And now here he was, shivering before the fire in his mother’s house where he had lived for all his brief twenty years, in this village that was a mere speck upon the world, and guilt washed through him.

The shivering brought clarity. It brought decision, heavy and solid as iron.

He had to go back. It was his duty, his responsibility, and he had to go back so that summer would return.

And that meant he had to tell his mother all the things that had happened. He had to try to explain to his mother, who had borne him, that he was not really human at all.

He shifted another log onto the fire and thought of that conversation, and he wondered whether he really had to.


	7. Chapter 7

The next day dawned cold, the wind still whistling and blowing icy flecks through a dim, grey sky, barely growing lighter with the return of the faint sun.

Thor was still awake at the fire, and as soon as he began to hear the shufflings of waking from the bedrooms, he got to his feet, stiff limbs creaking, and went to put the kettle on and start breakfast. He wanted it to at least begin as a good day.

Somehow, though, it was impossible to say what he needed to say across the table in the bleary first light, steaming mugs of tea and bowls of porridge and cold, sleepy hush, and Sif and Frigga both disappeared into the greenhouse before he managed to work himself up to it.

Lunchtime passed likewise, his throat feeling tight as he tried to force out the words.

He ended up spending the afternoon doing the washing, melting pot after pot of snow until he had a basin full of hot sudsy water—hours of work, scrubbing and soaking and wringing, work to keep his hands busy and to keep him from going mad from nerves and with the occasional creak of the roof under the weight of the snow, the constant awareness of the storm outside adding to the strain he felt, the urgency, the inevitability. 

He had realized at some point that it wasn’t just convincing Sif and his mother that it was true, though that would undoubtedly be hard enough. What would come after was the part he feared. 

When Frigga reemerged a little before suppertime to the sight of laundry strung here and there to dry, she raised an eyebrow and quirked a grin in his direction.

“My, you have been hard at work today,” she said.

Thor tried to smile back, but it felt stiff, false.

His mother’s smile faded as well. “Thor… are you alright? Is something wrong?”

He would have no excuse except for cowardice if he didn’t speak up after that, and he took a breath, though he still had no idea how to begin after trying all day to figure out what he would say.

“This is all my fault,” he said at last.

She eyed him with alarm, and in a moment she was beside him, leading him over to the seat near the fire. Stroking his hair, pushing a lock of it back behind his ear fondly the way she’d often done when he was a child.

It was hard to look her in the eyes, but she was peering at him with so much tenderness that he had to meet her gaze, at least for a moment.

“What’s your fault, dearest?”

“The… the weather. This storm. The whole winter.”

“What do you mean? How could it be? The winter is not at your command.”

He took another breath. Took her hands and drew himself upright.

“Mama, I have something to tell you,” he said. “And I know how incredible it will sound, but it’s true. I really believe it’s true. It’s about what the seer told me.”

“Alright,” she said, soothing, nodding to him to go on.  

Thor couldn’t help fidgeting. He hadn’t really worked out how to explain this part either.

“It’s not actually what he said, but I think it’s what he meant. See, the reason I went to the seer was because…”

Thor went on, explaining what had happened with Loki, with the stampede. How he had become suspicious that the strange young man who seemed to fancy him wasn’t what he seemed, and how he’d needed to know and had doubted that Loki would tell him himself. It all poured out, till he felt like he was babbling.

But his mother merely nodded along, asking little questions here and there only to clarify what he’d said.

He then told her how he hadn’t actually asked the seer that question. How he’d become too embarrassed at the last moment, but the man had answered it anyway.

Frigga squeezed his hands for reassurance when he paused. “So what was it he told you?” she asked.

“He said that it is possible for the winter spirit to appear in the form of a man.”

His mother tilted her head. “So you think your young man is the winter spirit?”

Thor nodded. “And he’s wandering the world, grieving for his brother.”

Thor watched carefully as his mother took this in. The look on her face was thoughtful. Not the incredulity he’d expected, nor even doubt, really. Her lips pressed together, considering. Weighing his words and his gestures and the tremble in his voice.

“That would explain the loneliness you saw in him before,” she said after a moment. “But that still doesn’t make you responsible for the storm, just because he spoke to you. Did something else happen?”

Thor had to look away. “Yes. The last time… I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. The next day the storm began. It’s my fault.”

“And what had happened that you didn’t want to see him?”

Thor steeled himself to tell her the rest. What he was. What Loki was to him.

“Mama—”

At just that moment, Sif emerged from the kitchen, and she strode past toward her bedroom, slowing slightly and glancing between them as she sensed the heaviness of the air, the lull of the conversation.

“Thor?”

Thor looked over at Frigga, a weak smile tugging at his mouth.

“Can I tell you both at once?” he asked.

*

The spot before the fire was the place they chose, Sif and Frigga exchanging worried glances as they all settled in.

Thor’s pulse was racing and his skin was damp and he only felt colder for it. His gaze caught on the window before he began, the snow piled up and glittering on the sill, or else it had gotten high enough that the thick whiteness he could see was the drifts beyond. And he began by telling Sif what he had already told his mother about his visit to the seer.

Through it all, his mother listened patiently, but Sif was more restless. She began to stir and fret, brows knitting.

“So?” she said when he fell silent. “What are we to do, then, if he is the winter spirit? How do we make him leave? How do we fight him?”

"I don't think we can. He’s not really a man. He just looks like one. How would we fight the winter?”

"We could at least make him realize he’s not welcome,” she grumbled.

Thor shook his head. “No… I don’t think that would help either.”

“Why not? Winter spirit or not, he has nothing to do with _you_. He shouldn’t be—”

Sif stopped herself when Thor heaved a breath and looked away.

“That’s not quite true. There is more the seer said. He also called me ‘summer’s son.’”

“Because you were born at the end of summer?” Sif asked. “What does that matter?”

“Part of the tale was that the summer spirit might have been reborn as a human,” Thor answered. “I think he meant it was me. Ever since then, I’ve been remembering things. And I think it’s true. I think it was me. And that means Loki is my brother.”

*

Neither of them laughed. Nor did they tell him he was mad. Thor knew how fortunate he was in that, that they trusted him enough not to dismiss it out of hand. But they didn’t yet believe.   

While Sif sat quiet, concern in her eyes, his mother asked him questions about what he had recalled, about what had happened to convince him it must be so. And he told them both about what had happened in the greenhouse, and the visions, everything else. How _real_ the memories were.

“I know it sounds impossible,” Thor added weakly once he had finished.

“It does,” Frigga said. “But so does an eternal winter.”

Sif was the one who broke the silence. “Well, is there any way to tell for sure?” She looked to Frigga. “A spell, maybe?”

The little hand-written book was still in its place of honor on the little bookshelf, and they all glanced toward it, its old, cracked leather binding wedged between a volume on herbs and a book of old poems and stories.

“No,” Frigga said, contemplative. “I don’t know any spells of that sort. But you’ve given me an idea anyhow. Give me just a few minutes.”

A few minutes later, Thor sat before a small bowl of soil into which his mother placed a seed, pressing it into the dirt with her finger then smoothing over the top.

“If you are the summer, perhaps it will sprout for you as the others did.”

With his heart in his throat, Thor put his hand to the soil and closed his eyes, thinking of green, of leaves, of sunlight and bounty, about a season he had never seen…

He imagined the seed sprouting beneath his palm, growing up in a burst of lushness to curl around his fingers. They would probably believe him then.

He needed them to believe him. IF he was going to do this, he needed them to know.

But he was also terribly afraid, and the fear curled and sparked inside him, running in hot-cold traces.

More of the summer spirit’s memories had been returning to him, superimposed upon his own, but it had not made _this_ life seem any less his own. If anything, he felt it more keenly. And as soon as they believed him, they would surely see that he would have to leave, to return to being some other sort of being entirely, far removed from them.

They would surely see that, and he dreaded it. He didn’t want to hurt them. No matter that he would be saving them as well, in a way far beyond anything he could hope to do as he was now.  

When Thor moved his hand away, the soil showed no signs of life, and a sigh escaped him, the breath warm and shaky as it gusted past his lips. His mother hummed.  

“Perhaps the rest of the discussion can wait until after we’ve all had supper,” she said. “Talking’s always easier on a full stomach, after all.”

The bowl was set aside, placed on the mantel, while they wandered together back into the kitchen. Leftover stew from lunch made a perfectly serviceable meal without taking much time or effort, and they ate at the little table, candlelight warm and flickering over faces in the quiet.

Thor wondered how many more such meals he would ever have, and he tried to cherish it as much as he could, the flavors and the sensations, the sight of his mother glancing at him fondly across the table, the warmth all around while the winter howled outside.

His whole life had been like this, surrounded by love, no matter how hard-won their survival was.

When they finished, they all helped to wash up, the work going swiftly with so many hands. And then they ventured back into the parlor.

Upon the mantel, the bowl sat bursting with green, and Frigga smiled as she looked at it, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

*

“So it’s true,” Sif said, her gaze piercing upon him as they sat again before the fire.  

Frigga had at first taken the bowl down from the mantel, cupping it in her hands, bringing it with her and setting it on her knees as if she might sense more from its proximity.

Something about her calm expression—Thor could see her understanding growing, spreading out from that point of green. The corners of her mouth twitched, the knowledge hidden in her eyes: he felt certain that she already knew all of it, all of what he had to do, and she was going to allow things to happen as they should, without hesitation.

He looked at his mother and she looked at him, silent in that shared knowledge, wordless feeling welling up in his chest. 

“So what now?" Sif said, abruptly breaking the silence. "What are we going to do?”

Thor swallowed heavily. “Well, first I will have to talk to Loki.”

“What? Why?”

They blinked at each other in confusion, but Sif went on before he could open his mouth.

“Just a little while ago you were insisting that we can’t do anything against him because he’s the entire winter and we cannot possibly fight him or make him go away. Now, just because you may have been the summer, you mean to confront him?”

Thor frowned. “No, not like that… Sif, I have to, don’t I?”

“But he’s dangerous. And clearly he means you harm, if everything from your tales is true. He hurt you before.”

Thor squirmed to hear it said like that, and he looked away, toward where the snow was built up outside the dark window, glowing faintly blue in some lingering light. He couldn’t help but think of Loki, his pale skin and his blue tunic and his black hair in the moonlight. His eager smiles, his lonely eyes.

“I don’t think he does mean me harm. Not really. This storm is because of me, because I told him to go away. I angered him, and he’s the winter. This is… what he does. But I don’t think he knows who I am. He wanted to talk to me because I interested him, but I don’t think he understood _why_ he felt that way. I don’t think _he_ knows that I was his brother. So I have to speak to him. I have to tell him.”

This only worsened Sif’s look of alarm, the suspicion and worry on her face.

“If he’s doing _this_ without knowing who you are, what’s to stop him from doing worse once he knows? Thor…”

He smiled, trying to be reassuring. “I’ll be alright, Sif. I have to do this.”

Sif looked like she was going to argue, but at that point Frigga set the bowl down, the little green leaves rustling at the motion.

“Yes, I think you probably do,” she said, with only the faintest hint of sadness in her voice. “And I know you will do all you can, for everyone. But not tonight.”

The wind gusted outside, and Thor nodded in agreement. “Tomorrow,” he said.  

When she stood, she opened her arms and Thor gladly let himself be enfolded in them, her head resting against his shoulder.

“Perhaps I should have known,” she murmured. “You’ve always been so warm.”

It was a little harder to let go, and Thor’s eyes felt damp as she disappeared down the hallway to her bedroom.

After she’d gone, Sif still looked unsatisfied, but then she gave a sigh.

“You’re going to anyway no matter what I say, of course,” she said with a half laugh. “Just be careful. Don’t make me try to fight the winter for your sake.”

Thor grinned at her. “I know you would, too.”  

Sif grinned back for a moment, but then turned somber.

“Well, if you insist on talking to him, I insist that you be well rested to do it. Let me watch the fire tonight. Go get some sleep.”

*

In the dark, Thor curled up in his bed to wait out the night hours, the creeping chill and the frost tapping on the windows. The wind blowing wild and lonesome outside.

Here, inside, he was warm. But he thought of what he meant to do the next day, and he shivered.

He had to go back, though he would be leaving this life behind. Leaving those he loved, those who loved him. It was the only way to save them all, so he had to go back and be the summer again.  

But he did not yet know if Loki would _want_ him to come back. Despite his reassurances to Sif, he had no idea how Loki might react when Thor told him.

And he did not know what he would be going back _to_. He tried to imagine returning, knowing the whole world relied upon him… and finding that Loki still did not love him. He imagined being just as miserable as before but knowing that he could never escape it again.

He imagined that, and his stomach clenched with worry.

But when he thought of speaking to Loki again, actually being near him again now that he knew… his limbs buzzed with an anxious energy that didn’t feel entirely like fear. He felt almost impatient for the morning to come, whatever it might bring.

The wind howled beyond his window and the timbers of the house creaked softly and he lay awake for a long time listening to it, unable to find any rest.

Eventually he slept. Eventually he woke and went about his chores, trying to gather himself, though the hours seemed to pass as slow as a trickle of frozen sap. Over lunch, Sif and Frigga shared glances but said nothing despite the tension in the air, and Thor was grateful not to have to explain.

It was perhaps an hour before sundown when he could not wait any longer and sat by the door shoving his feet into his boots, wrapping himself up in his warmest coat and pulling a hat over his head, feeling it muss the hair near his ears.

And when he was done, he did not think about it anymore at all but only stepped out the door into the cold, pulling it firmly closed behind him.  


	8. Chapter 8

“Loki!”

Thor shouted into the roar of the wind, against the swirling snow, as he had been doing for longer than he cared to think, long enough that his throat was growing hoarse with the cold and his ears and nose stung with it. Anger and determination heated him from within as the cold shoved and bullied him and sliced into every exposed inch of his skin. He had gone only a few paces beyond the door—along the walkway path that was nearly a tunnel beneath the drifts now, shoving through crumbling snow up to his waist until he felt swallowed up in the grey-white world, stopping just before the lights of the house were lost behind him.

“Loki! Loki, come back! I need to talk to you! … Loki!”

He almost didn’t see it at first, the shadowy figure just visible through the white haze. Approaching nearer in slow, trailing steps through the deep snow. When Loki came near enough for Thor to see his face, he was silent, wearing a hurt, wary expression.

“Loki…” Thor repeated, staring, the words he’d planned to say deserting him.

“Are you calling me back just to send me away again?” Loki asked, scowling, bitter as the wind.

Thor shook his head and (awkwardly) found he had to wipe his cold, running nose on the cuff of his sleeve. “No, I’m not. I have to talk to you. I have something to tell you. And something to ask you.”

Loki’s brows twisted. “I’m listening.”

“I know you can’t stop the winter, and I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just…” Thor paused and took a breath. “Loki, you had a brother, didn’t you?”

Around them, the wind seemed to halt, quieting in the space of a few moments, though Thor could see the snow still blowing farther away.

“I did,” Loki said, hollow, hushed. “But he’s gone.”

“What happened to him?”

Loki’s shoulders curled in as he turned away. “I don’t know. He left. He’s gone.”

It was like stepping out over the edge of a cliff into nothing. But Thor had to say it. He had to get it over with.

“I… I think that was me. I think I was him.”

All at once, Loki was staring at him, wide-eyed, and he shook his head. “No… my brother is gone. You make me think of him, and that’s why I wanted to look at you. But he’s gone. He left me. You’re not him.”  

“I think I am, though,” Thor stuttered, teeth chattering, breath a white mist in the air. “I’ve been starting to remember. I remember _you_. And I remember how long we spent at war with each other.”

The memory of those battles still hurt, dreadfully, and he didn’t want to speak of it, didn’t want to think of it. But he needed Loki to listen to him, and that seemed the surest way. To remind him of something that had been shared only between them, something that only they had known.

“You can’t be him,” Loki insisted, sounding lost. Bereft. Standing there small and motionless, a pale figure in the blue twilight. “You can’t. He’s gone.”

Loki sounded like he was grieving. And if he grieved, if he had suffered since Thor left… didn’t that mean Loki really did love him?

Thor squirmed at the thought, unsure.

“And anyway, you’re mortal,” Loki added, shuffling his fur boots where they sunk in the deep snow.

“I am now,” Thor answered. “But I was born at sundown on the last day of the last summer. I’ve been alive exactly as long as your brother’s been gone. Isn’t it… possible?”

Loki’s glance flickered to him and then away. He took half a sideways step closer as a few stray snowflakes blustered around them.

He looked like he was torn between doubt and hope, the corners of his mouth downturned and twitching, his brow furrowed deep.

“You can’t be him,” he repeated. “But… if you were… I might be able to tell if I touched you.”

Instantly, Thor held out his arms, palms up in invitation. “Go ahead. Touch me.”

Loki stood before him, glittering flakes lingering on his midnight hair, the deep ice green of his eyes intent upon the place where he reached out his own hands toward Thor’s, bridging the gap slowly, hesitant.

The moment when Loki’s fingertips slid just into the sleeves of his coat and came to rest on the soft skin at the inside of his wrists was like nothing Thor had ever felt before, and he knew, _knew_ it was all true.

Tears sprang to his eyes, and his heart began to thump in his chest, and at the same time it was all incredibly far away, because wind was rushing over him and he was floating bathed in brilliant light and he was also standing right here, with his brother’s hands upon him and the sound of Loki’s cry of shock ringing in the air, resounding in his ears.

Long ago, at the beginning of time, they had played together, swirling and wrestling and laughing and fighting, testing their powers and learning each other.

And now he was back there, though with flesh between them. He had his brother in his arms.

*

Loki wasn’t weeping as he clung tight to Thor, but it seemed he should have been. Thor wasn’t sure he knew that’s what mortals did. After a while they pulled apart enough to see each other’s faces, still holding each other by the arms, fingers clutching.

“Why did you leave, brother?” Loki asked, plaintive. Distressed.

The sound of his voice thrummed against something within Thor. Moments ago part of him had still been angry at his brother, unable to understand and certain of the worst, the darkest fears digging into him like claws. But the echoes of that feeling hummed in resonance with Loki’s words.

How could it be that Loki did not already know the answer to that? Did he really not know how Thor had been hurting? Had he been just as confused?

Had they both misunderstood each other?

“I hated fighting you,” Thor mumbled as his chest ached, as the cold stung his skin unnoticed, as he blinked at flecks of ice that landed upon his eyelids.

Loki’s face pinched. “But we were together. And you _left_ me.”

“I know,” Thor answered, throat tight. “I just couldn’t bear it anymore. There was nothing between us but battle and that was all there had been for so long.”

Loki looked at him, uncertainty still glimmering in his eyes. Glanced away. “But I didn’t know where you’d gone. Nothing has been right without you. It’s… it’s all up to me and everything is dying and I can’t help it and I don’t know what to do.”

The tide of guilt rose within Thor once again, familiar.

“I couldn’t bear it,” Thor repeated. “I thought you hated me.”

“I thought you knew I love you.”

And he sounded so crestfallen that Thor could not do anything but tug him into another embrace, muffling his own sob against Loki’s shoulder. “If you would only show it. At least sometimes.”

They continued to hold each other for a long time, unwilling to let go. When Loki did at last draw back again, it was to look into his eyes. “I will. I promise, I will. If you’ll come back with me…”

Swiftly, Thor nodded, and the intensity of Loki’s eyes upon him was the opposite of gazing upon a distant storm. It made a thrill run through his veins. It made him feel like he might be the center of the universe. It made his breath catch on the cold air, in anticipation, though he wasn’t sure what he was waiting for.  

Meanwhile, Loki's fingers played distractedly along the soft, sensitive skin of Thor's wrists and he seemed to hesitate, his gaze flitting between Thor's mouth and anywhere else but his eyes.

Thor caught himself gazing at his brother’s slightly parted mouth as well, wondering if Loki still…

“Are you cold?” Loki asked suddenly, with a worried frown.

Startled, Thor shrugged. “Not really, it's not so bad.”

“When mortals’ lips are that color, it generally means they're cold,” Loki added, still fidgeting. “Unless I'm mistaken.”

Thor laughed, only just then noticing his own shivering. “I guess I am. Can we go in? I want to talk to you more. Is that alright?”

Loki nodded willingly, and Thor took his hand and led him inside.

*

Thor wasn’t sure whether Loki had ever been _indoors_ anywhere. At least, the blinking look he gave as he stepped over the threshold indicated he might not have.

Then Loki stopped short, and Thor quickly saw why: Sif and his mother, waiting for them in the entryway.

It felt endlessly strange, shuffling his feet and stomping the snow from his boots and feeling his mother’s eyes upon him as he tried to figure out what to say. How he could possibly introduce them.

“Mama, this is Loki,” he said at last. “Can he come in? We… we talked, but we have more to talk about.”

Thor wasn’t sure which part was responsible for the tension in his belly as he waited for her answer: the fact that Loki was the spirit of winter, the cause of the last twenty years of misery in the village—or the fact that right now he looked like a young man of Thor’s age. A young man who she had once had to point out clearly fancied him.

But while Frigga was studying them, Sif was biting her tongue—and then not.

“Thor, are you sure about this?” she asked. “He’s…”

Thor huffed a breath. “I know. But this is important, Sif. I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you? If he’s really what you say he is—”

Discomfort flowed in Thor’s veins, and he glanced over to where Loki was watching the scene unfold, head tilted to one side, shoulders high and tense. Thor opened his mouth to answer.

But Frigga stepped forward, peering into Loki’s face and reaching out to take his hand, enfolding it in her own. Thor saw the twitch in her brow as she felt how cold he was. And how cold he was not: not a thing made of ice but simply a man coming in from the deadly chill.

“I’ve spent years doing my best to help those in need. If my son has invited you, then you are welcome.”

Loki nodded, blinking at her kindness.

Thor smiled at his mother, full of gratitude, and she returned it with a nod, releasing Loki’s hand and trailing back to where Sif stood, murmuring that they ought to allow the two some space to talk.

Sif glanced back once but followed.

Thor sighed with relief.

And then they were alone again, the warmth of the house flowing around them like a lifetime of memories, but now his brother was here beside him and everything was changed.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to have this posted for yesterday but alas. Here you go anyway!

Loki seemed to not at all know what to make of the house when Thor led him through it, into the comfortable parlor, toasty-warm and lit golden by the fire in the hearth. He peered around at everything, questions evident in his eyes.

A small picture on the mantel caught his attention particularly, and he picked up the little frame, turning it over in his hands and staring at the face upon it.

It was an engraving done when Thor was very young, an extravagance that had only happened because an old widower in the village had insisted upon paying for his share from the gardens, refusing any hint of charity, and Frigga knew that the man had once been an artist.

“This is an image of you?”

Thor nodded.

Loki frowned and looked even more confused. “You look different now. At least this part of you.”

“I grew,” Thor replied with a shrug.

That did not seem to help, and Loki continued to study the little picture. Or perhaps he was just holding it, staring at it, eyes losing focus.

Thor made himself wait, perching on the wooden seat with its intricately carved arms in the forms of animals, the pillows and furs thick upon it for comfort, his eyes lingering upon Loki. His brother. The winter spirit, with the last melting snow from his fur boots dripping silently onto the floor in the warmth of that room.

When at last Loki did speak, it was in a mumble, not looking up at him.  

“If you were here the whole time, why didn’t you miss me? I missed you. I thought you were gone forever. I was afraid I’d never be with you again.”

The guilt lingering in Thor’s belly squirmed and his throat felt tight. “I might have missed you if I’d remembered who I was. I didn’t know. I didn’t remember any of it, not until just a few days ago.”

Loki didn’t seem satisfied by this, though. He seemed only sadder, more confused. He shook his head, still clutching the engraving in its silver frame. “But why did you want to be away from me to begin with? You said it was because we fought, but we had always done that.”

“I know,” Thor said. “It was just… it didn’t seem the same. You were _cold_.”

Loki frowned. “I can’t help that.”

“No, I mean… you hardly noticed when you’d hurt me, and when you did notice, you were _pleased_. And then afterward you only wanted to fight me again. There was nothing else. It just went on and on.”

Loki gazed at him with blinking eyes, and when he spoke his voice was soft with longing. “But… that was because we matched each other perfectly, just as we’re meant to.”

“You laughed each autumn,” Thor pointed out, speaking past the lump in his throat. “When you _won_.”

Loki’s mouth twitched as he groped for words.

“I thought you liked it all as much as I did,” he said at last, and there was a sort of nervous sadness on his face. He shifted on his feet the same way Thor had often seen him do in the snow, but here he was out of his element and it only made him look more upset.

Thor blinked, a sinking sensation in his belly as he thought this through and looked back over the tangled knot of his memories, trying to make sense of it.

Maybe Loki really had seen it all differently. As a companionable rivalry, a game played in chaos between opponents of equal strength, but a game. Maybe the hateful battle Thor had been engaged in and aching over… maybe Loki had never known of it, and to him Thor’s disappearance had come with no warning, no explanation. No reason at all.

So many times since they’d met, Thor had thought how strange Loki was, and now he had to wonder if Loki hadn’t always found _him_ peculiar as well. If they’d ever been able to comprehend each other, as different as they were.

“I’m sorry for scaring you and leaving you alone,” Thor said as the quiet stretched.

Loki made a tiny noise, and he set down the engraving and wandered over toward Thor. “I’m sorry for making you think I didn’t love you,” Loki said. “Whatever I did that caused that.”

Outside, snow fell silently in the darkness.

After a brief consideration, Loki sat down on the bench beside him, angled so that he could touch Thor’s hands and wrists again, and Thor welcomed it.

He liked how he could feel it still, the spark between them, tension and familiarity at once.

He also liked how it made Loki smile to feel it.

“You’re warmer now,” Loki said.

“So are you,” Thor answered, grinning back.

It felt so long ago now that Loki had tried pursuing him, behaving so strangely and trying to convince Thor to let Loki look at him or touch him. Or to be intimate with him.

Thor wondered if Loki still wanted any of those things now that he knew they were brothers, and he swallowed thickly as he thought of it. As he realized which answer he hoped for.

Why shouldn’t they? Loki was the winter and he was the summer. Mortal qualms had little to do with them, surely. And he still fancied Loki just as much as ever, enough that he felt it like an ache.

But Loki was merely gazing at him, touching his hands, stroking his fingers from the roughened calluses of his palms to the tender insides of his forearms. Loki looked like he was trying to memorize every detail, and when he looked up, his eyes were glowing with shy adoration.

All of a sudden Thor felt terribly impatient, not wanting to wait for Loki to dare to ask him again. So he leaned close, close enough to press their lips together, and Loki gasped in shock, nearly jerking away.

“You asked me before, if I would… if I wanted to, um…” Thor began in a shaky, stuttering whisper, heart thumping with embarrassment. “Do you still…”

Loki blinked again. “I thought you didn’t want that.”

Everything had changed since then, since he’d remembered, since he’d learned what he was. And now, in this body—his own body, but with more memories every moment, so that he felt everything afresh—he was achingly aware of his brother beside him, beautiful and incomprehensible and within his reach.

A tremble shivered down Thor’s spine. “I do now, if you still want to. Please. My bedroom is right down this hall.”

*

Thor’s bedroom, cozy and familiar, felt different with Loki within it, peering around for only moments before focusing on him again and coming nearer, tentatively reaching for him this time and kissing him. Surely Loki had never kissed anyone before, his mouth soft and eager but aimless, lips parting a heartbeat after Thor led the way, letting the kiss slowly deepen. When Thor eventually broke the kiss, bringing his arms up between them and levering his brother away a few inches, it was only because of his own impatient excitement rising. Otherwise they could probably wind up spending the whole night standing there in the middle of the floor and just kissing, never getting any further than that.

At least the room was warmed enough that when Thor moved to peel off his shirt and trousers and underclothes, it meant only a little rise of gooseflesh in the chill. Not the sort of cold that would have had him diving under the blankets. He was glad of that. He wanted to see, wanted to touch. And Loki seemed to agree.

As Thor stripped away his garments, Loki seemed fascinated, insisting upon staying near to touch him, exploring Thor’s body with his fingertips.

Thor had done this with only a few partners, having little enough time for youthful fumbling, always feeling that there were more important things to do. But that little bit of experience didn’t seem to matter anyway. None of them had been like Loki, and his brother’s strangeness—in this moment, Thor loved it like he had never loved anything else, desire rushing through him with each unexpected gesture.

Rapt, Loki stared, tracing fingers on every inch of bared skin. And when Thor stood naked at last, Loki frowned down at himself and then began tugging away his tunic and boots, awkwardly, as if he had never bothered to remove them before. As if the need had never occurred to him. And the freshly bared skin was just as pale as the rest of him.

He looked like the winter. Like a bare-limbed birch, graceful and sturdy under a dark sky. Or he looked like a naked young man, hair mussed and expression a little awkward as he stood in Thor’s bedroom, his nipples small and taut and dark on his lean chest, his cock beginning to harden, the pink head peeking out.

Or he simply looked like Thor’s brother, eyes intent upon him as Thor moved to lie upon the bed, tugging Loki along with him.

Loki obligingly followed, clambering atop when Thor spread his knees and beckoned, and still he continued touching, looking with eager fascination.

He brushed the pads of his fingers along the little wrinkle of skin at Thor’s armpits. Experimented with using his lips to touch with as well, putting them to Thor’s collarbone, and then—apparently deeming this a success—using his cheek, and when he pressed that to Thor’s chest, he gasped.

“I can hear your heart so clearly!”

Thor couldn’t help but laugh a little.

Loki pulled back enough to look up at him. “You haven’t told me how you figured out how to do this. How did you…?”

For a moment, Thor thought he meant _this_ , being naked together, touching each other. But Loki’s eyes were filled with something even further into awe.

“It is strange, not being everywhere,” Loki added. “Just feeling this one little piece of the world. But I feel _so much_ of it. It’s like everything is gone and there’s nothing else but us. How did you…”

“Come up here and kiss me, brother,” Thor demanded, in lieu of attempting to answer.

And when Loki was laid out fully upon him, their bodies pressed together chest and hip and thigh, Thor wrapped his arms around him.

“How did _you_ figure out how to do _this_?” Thor asked between kisses. He had been wondering that as well. “This form—you weren’t born into it, right?”

Loki made a soft noise and shook his head. “No… after the first time I saw you, I thought you might be more willing to speak to me if I were a creature like you. So I looked to see how the mortals are put together and what they’re made of. It’s mostly water, really.”

Thor laughed again. Even now, as a sweet weight atop him, Loki was so strange.

So odd, so incomprehensible—the gap between them had grown from that, deepening with Thor’s fears, the hurt that grew out of his confusion. But now it was all changed. Now, his entire being ached and strained toward his brother, and he thrilled at each motion Loki made against him.

At first, as they explored each other, Loki moved only in a mirror to what Thor did, but Thor could feel it when Loki began to grasp the nature of this embrace. Soon after, Loki began to squirm slightly in his arms, his kissing growing more frantic. Thor nibbled at his lips, sucked on his tongue, and he felt Loki beginning to pant, felt the thickening of the organ pressed against his hip until it was firm as rock, and Thor grinned and ground his pelvis against him, his own hardness suddenly urgent as well. His fingers ran down the cool, lithe plane of his brother’s back, and his own moan slipped out at the feeling of it all.

Loki was breathing fast, hard. “So how do we do this?” he asked.

Thor bit his lip. Of his partners, two had been young women, and with them he had only used his mouth and they theirs, not wanting to risk a child. And the one young man he’d been with, they had only used their hands.

“We can just continue like this, if it feels good.”

Loki shook his head. “No, I want to be inside you. That’s what the mortal creatures do, isn’t it?”

“That will be a little more complicated, I think.”

Loki pressed a brief kiss to the edge of his mouth, a few more across his cheeks, until he was murmuring into Thor’s ear. “Brother, do you remember what it was like long ago? Before there were boundaries between us.”

Thor remembered, and he thought about it—perceiving it in a way he hadn’t before, through the lens of this body, feeling it even more intimate, thinking of the force with which they had striven against each other and the powerful rush, indescribable now, that had come with it—and he squirmed and nodded. “I remember.”

“Please, brother.” More gentle, importuning kisses. “I want to be inside you again.”

Thor could not say no. But he could—and, indeed, had to—tell Loki what to do to make it possible, grabbing a little jar from the drawer in his bedside table (an oil useful for soothing skin dried and chapped by the winter cold, among other things) and instructing him on what to do with it. Loki obeyed with the same curiosity and fascination as he’d shown for everything else, kneeling between Thor’s spread legs, slicking himself up and then reaching down between Thor’s thighs. The ice green of his eyes moving up and down Thor’s body as he painted the oil across Thor’s entrance with his fingers.

Thor had never done this and had heard only a few stories, but he knew they would need the oil and Loki would have to go slowly, and he was terribly nervous, breath fluttering at each little touch, but that only made him want more fervently.

Loki had been rubbing at him in little circles, smoothing the oil across the tender flesh, and the tip of his finger slipped inside, making Thor gasp, and Loki blinked at him, a look of concern on his face.

“I don't want to hurt you, though. Is it really alright?”

Thor’s cheeks heated a bit at that, and more when he looked down past his own erection in the soft lamplight and past his own spread thighs to see Loki’s cock bobbing there glistening, ruddier than the rest of his pale skin. It was lovely, and Thor wasn’t sure how much of his sudden need was the feeling of wanting his brother inside him again as they had once been and what was the new craving to experience it in this body. Or if there was any difference between the two at all.  

Thor nodded. “We’ll just have to be careful and go slow.”

Loki’s fingers traced through the oil, every motion sparking on sensitive nerves, but he seemed unsure still, and Thor bit his lip.

“Please, brother… please try.”

So carefully, hesitantly, Loki did, leaning forward over Thor and rubbing the head of his cock against him until it slipped in, and then pressing into him in a slow, gradual slide that didn’t quite hurt but felt like nothing else Thor had ever experienced. The strangest pressure stretching him inside, an invasion but one he welcomed, one he _needed_. When the long slide ended, he had his brother’s weight pressed down upon him again.

Thor’s eyes squeezed shut at the sensation, the heady twitch inside him every few moments, and his arms wrapped tight around his brother’s pale shoulders, and Loki kissed him on his cheeks, his throat, lips tender everywhere they wandered.  

“I am supposed to move, though, right?”

Thor gasped and breathed and nodded. “Yes, but… in a moment.”

Loki stayed still, and Thor waited until the feeling was easier—until he didn’t feel on the verge of overwhelmed from how _good_ it was. This fulfillment, being no longer alone. Having his brother inside him and pressed against him, with no hurt, no anger. He took deep breaths until his heart calmed and his vision cleared, and then loosened his grip just a little. “Alright. Now. Just go slow.”

Loki did, sliding against him in gentle pushes, and the feeling stirred both memories and physical sensations in Thor at once, brushing against sensitive places within him that made his cock leak and throb where it was trapped between them.

“Is… is it good?” Loki asked, nervous, as he began to grasp how to move, leaning on his hands above Thor. His gaze flicked across Thor’s body, and Thor could almost feel it, how preternaturally aware of him Loki seemed to be. Loki noticed every spark he caused, every shudder, and he studied each reaction and learned from it. Thor nodded in response to that question, with a moan that tilted his head back, and Loki sank lower to kiss him fiercely, as Thor had not yet realized he wanted.

Thor had needed this, deeply, though he had not known. His brother’s rapt attention on him, his utter focus. Loki touched him all over, curious and eager and reverent, and he gave his own surprised little whimpers, sweet to Thor’s ears, when Thor met his thrusts with growing need. When Thor twined his legs around his brother's and bucked against him, remembering feelings from long ago, the intensity of their embrace when there was nothing else in the universe but them. And somewhere in the middle of it, Thor had sweat on his skin and his brother’s taste in his mouth and a strange warmth in the center of his chest, like it might spill out of him in a golden glow. Pleasure coursing through him in waves from the rolling of Loki’s hips, from the feeling of having him inside.

Learning each other all over again. But better this time. 

And it wasn’t like battle when Thor at one point grinned and took hold of his brother and turned them both over so that he was riding, his brother’s slim, strong hips clamped between his legs, Loki staring up at him. They found their rhythm again swiftly, and Thor could hear his brother’s quiet moans, could watch his body squirm, could take his hand and bring it to Thor’s cock to wrap around his length and stroke him, showing Loki what he needed.

He didn’t know if Loki knew of this part, the impending peak, but he hoped so. He wanted to share that with his brother. He wanted to feel that together.

When Thor came, it jolted through him, sensations overwhelming him, a tightening in his belly, a pulsing—and whether he had expected it or not, Loki followed immediately after, green eyes wide, gasping out a soft cry.

When they collapsed together, shuddering and breathless and touching and kissing desperately, Thor almost wondered why he was still in his body, for surely after this he could never be separated from his brother again.

*

The next morning, he woke with Loki still lying naked beside him, limbs tangled with Thor’s, and it nonetheless all almost seemed like it must have been a dream.

When he blinked and yawned and stretched awake and turned his head to wake his brother as well, though, he found that Loki’s eyes were already open.

“Mm, did you not sleep?” he asked, grinning a little.

Loki half-shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know how. So I watched you. I like this body of yours, brother, no matter how small and fragile it is. It’s beautiful. And I still very much like the color of your hair,” Loki added, reaching to wind a few of the strands around his fingers, bringing them to his face to stroke against his cheek.”

Thor absorbed this in silence, thrilling a little at the compliment—but with the gap between them unsettling him once more. To lie here, living and mortal and part of this life, native to it in a way that Loki was clearly not…  it was strange.

“You’re smaller than I am,” he said, though, in reply.

That made Loki glance down at himself with a look of surprise.

“I guess I am. Should I be larger?”

Quickly, Thor shook his head. “No… I like you like this as well. And we’ll have to go back soon anyway.”

“You’re really going to return with me?”

Thor nodded. It hardly felt like some grand dramatic decision now. With Loki beside him, it seemed simply to be the obvious course. The way to put things right in the world.

That thought lingered as Thor slipped out from the warmth of the blankets, feet upon the cold floor and goosebumps rising on his skin before he managed to pull on clothes.

They had to go back. The trouble was that he wasn’t sure how to do it.

That question had been at the back of his mind since the moment he had understood what he was, and it had become more pressing now that they were together again, things mended between them.

He still didn’t know the answer.

The most obvious point was that he had done it before, so he ought to know how to do it again. Yet what he remembered was simply _willing_ it. Deciding it and making it be so, both in the same action.

When he tried it there in his bedroom, barefoot, tightening his fists in concentration and murmuring to himself that he wished to go back now and be as he had been, there was no change. Nothing happened, no hint that anything ever would.

“Loki, how do I do it?” he asked. “How do I return? I want to, only… I don’t know how.”

Loki looked at him with worry on his face. “I don’t know either. I’m not even sure how you made yourself mortal to begin with. I have no idea how to bring you back.”

Dread filled Thor’s heart. What if he couldn’t? What if he’d done something that he couldn’t undo, and now he would live out his life knowing that he had doomed the world to unending, wretched cold?

He clenched his jaw, refusing to believe that.

“Very well. I do know one person we can ask.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, gosh, I didn't mean to make everybody wait this long for the last bit, but I got stuck in final edits and then looked at the calendar and... well, here we are. Happy equinox, everybody! Thank you so much to all who have been reading and letting me know how you've liked it! I hope you enjoy the ending.
> 
> Also, my gratitude to [Lise](http://gorgeousgalatea.tumblr.com/) and [Schaudwen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Schaudwen/pseuds/Schaudwen) for their help with this chapter!

When they left that morning, his mother was already in the greenhouse, and Thor didn’t think he could bear to say what could very well be _goodbye_ to her. He might not actually leave if he tried. Instead he spent a few minutes at his desk, the nib of his pen scraping across the paper, trying not to get too choked up as he apologized, explained, apologized again, all the things he needed to tell them and none of the words feeling like the right ones. None of them seeming like enough. Surely they would forgive him, though, when summer returned.

In the end he left the folded notes on the kitchen table, the house echoing with quiet around him, heart racing as he looked around at it all, the cupboard and the stove and the little jars of dried herbs, all so familiar and comfortable, and realized he was probably doing so for the very last time.

Loki followed his gaze, studying the space with mere curiosity, and Thor couldn’t stand it any longer. He grabbed Loki’s hand and led him toward the door. He kept his footsteps as quiet as he could without feeling like he was _sneaking_ , a few more steps…  

They were passing the door to the greenhouse when it opened and Sif emerged. It was only a moment before her face fell in horror, realization in her eyes as she glanced between them, at the pack Thor carried, at Thor’s guilty face.

“Thor, where are you going?” she asked, sounding choked, eyes wide.

And he could not lie to her.

“To the seer,” he said. “To ask how I go back to being the summer spirit.”

“Go back? Thor…”

“The winter will never end as long as I’m _here_. I have to go back.”

She shook her head, fervent. “No, you don’t! You don’t _have to_.” Her brow twisted with distrust as she gazed at Loki, who was waiting at Thor’s side and half a pace behind, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, making the floorboards softly creak. “You told me before that what you remember is being miserable for thousands of years. How can you want that again?”

Some little flame burned hot in Thor’s chest. “It won’t be like that now,” he said. “But even if it would be, I would still want to do this, because I’ll be saving you and Mama and everyone. I can put an end to this winter and bring summer back again. How much longer do you think our people can survive? And I can save them. I have to do this, Sif.”

Her fists clenched and she bit her lip.

And—after a moment—he reached out to take her hands in his, smoothing his thumbs over her knuckles until the tension eased out of her fingers. She was his oldest friend, and he studied her face as he groped for words.

“It will be alright, Sif. I will be alright. And… you’ll be able to do what you truly want with your life rather than forever working in the gardens. I know that was never what you dreamed of. Promise me, when summer returns you’ll do what will make you happy.”

Sif blinked a few times, rapidly, and tears sneaked down her cheeks, something he hadn’t seen since after her parents died.

“I don’t want this to be real. But it is, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s actually true, and you’re going to be gone.”

Thor tried to answer, but all he could manage was a shrug.

After a brief hesitation she cursed softly under her breath. Then she threw her arms around him and held tight until he felt the dampness soaking through at his shoulder.

When she stood back, her eyes were rimmed in red, and they flickered toward the door to the greenhouse.

“Should I go and… ?”

Quickly, Thor shook his head. “No, please, just… please tell her for me. Tell Mama that I’m grateful for everything she ever did for me. And tell her that I love her, and that I’m going to bring back the summer storms for her. And I love you too, Sif.”

Sif nodded once more, and Thor tore himself away at last, pushing quietly out the door with his heart in his throat, Loki trailing along beside him.

Out into the snow-covered lane between the taller drifts, tiny flakes pricking cold and wet against his eyelids, and he did not look back until they were at the edge of the village and the sight of the house was lost among the grey-white of ground and air and sky.

*

It was much different from what such a journey would have ever been before the storm. Much harder, much more treacherous. And though he had the winter beside him to help, that only made it _possible,_ not simple.

Thor remembered the way. But everything looked different, and quite often the path he wanted to take proved too awkward, snow piled in mounded drifts twice their height or lying in peaceful slopes where Thor was sure steep trenches lurked below. It was a little easier under the trees where the snow had not fallen as heavily, but there he found even fewer signs of the path he had taken before, the route Mimir had shown him.

Loki had asked at first where they were going, and Thor told him all about the seer and his wisdom and how Thor had gone to ask questions of him before. Loki had listened, nodding along, but when Thor was done Loki had seemed just a little doubtful, uncertainty on his face.

“If he’s just a mortal, though, how will he know what to tell you?”

Thor shrugged. “How did he know you’re the winter? It doesn’t really matter, as long as he can.”

Thor wasn’t sure if that answer had satisfied, but Loki fell silent anyway and seemed to accept it.

As they trudged onward, that same silence reigned.

Thor crunched through the deep snow, feeling the cold in his toes, and trying to push down the swirl of his own feelings. There was anticipation bordering on nervous fear, growing with each step he took, and guilt clenching inside him. The memory of Sif’s face and the goodbye that he had not said to his mother. A feeling of loss, leaving his entire life behind, the hard, satisfying work of eking out survival in a tiny, isolated village in the endless winter. The weight of responsibility upon him and the sensation of thousands of years of memory that could not quite fit within his mind.

It was only bearable if he kept his mind off it. As long as he kept his gaze focused on the horizon, on his goal.

At night, that was harder to do.  In the dim twilight they made camp beneath creaking ice-heavy boughs, the sound of wolves’ howls echoing in the distance, and by the time they bedded down it was far too cold to do more than kiss a bit and hold each other beneath the blankets. Exhausted and sluggish, with the chill in his bones, Thor would squirm and huff and shudder while Loki pressed against him, the mild warmth of his body welcome.

“Too cold,” Thor hissed through chattering teeth. “Under, under.”

With blankets pulled up over their heads, huddling together, Thor tried to sleep, but his thoughts were restless.

“You should sleep,” Loki whispered after interminable time had passed, his eyes anxious in the dark. He yawned, a gesture he had been imitating from watching Thor ever since he had learned that it was contagious.

Thor grumbled in reply. “I know. I’m trying.”

Eventually Thor did, surely, though it hardly seemed like it in the bleak, misty chill of morning, eyes stinging in the grey light.

Another day, and another… and a feeling that they would never reach their destination. Frustration building as he wondered how it could be so hard to find, and worry about what would happen if they never did. Pushing himself until he sweated within his coat and shuddered afterward in the bitter wind, because what mattered was that he didn’t _stop_.

Another day of nibbling a few bites, all of it seeming dry and tasteless, just to keep himself going, and trying to ignore the hollow, nervous feeling in his belly. His brother beside him putting a hand to his arm, and Thor tried to smile at him but felt like he was fooling no one.

Another night of lying down to the feeling of a grey dullness creeping over everything. It felt like it had been forever since he’d been warm, but he wouldn’t spare the time it would take to build a fire, and he didn’t have the energy anyway.

Thor slept, the bitter wind wailing outside, the cold working its way into the marrow of his bones.

*

When he woke again, it was to a silence filled with crackling, and to the feeling of Loki’s hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him.

“Brother, wake up,” Loki was pleading. “Come on, I’ve made a fire. You need to get warm. You’re too cold. Come on.”

It was hard to piece the words together into meaning, the sounds slipping through his mind like wet ice through clumsy fingers, but with difficulty he did as Loki coaxed, struggling to sit up and then to lever himself out of bed and toward the promised warmth.

When at last he did—after Loki had gotten him perched safely on a log, blankets tight and thick around his shoulders and the fire’s heat seeping through them—he realized that the wind had died down utterly.

Slowly, the greyness began to clear, letting color back into the world. The yellow-red of the flames, bursting in flares of bright blue-white where sap threaded through the branches. The brown of the wood, blackening before his eyes.

He flexed his fingers under the layers of blanket, a few stray shivers still jolting him.

He had always been careful before. Twenty years of stories of what happened to those who lost their vigilance against a winter night. Twenty years of knowing full well how quickly the cold could kill those who let it.

But when he turned his face to Loki, the guilt and dismay he saw there made his own shame fade into nothing.

“You didn’t tell me you were so cold,” Loki said, and it was odd for Thor to see the tears shining in his eyes. Yet another mortal action that Loki had learned in such a short time. “I didn’t realize until… your skin was like ice and you wouldn’t wake at first when I touched you. All I could think of was a fire. Is it going to be enough? Are you alright now?”

Quickly Thor nodded, and he was. He was already feeling much better. “It’s good. It’s exactly what I needed. It’s not your fault, though. I should have known too.”

Loki glanced away, shaking his head.

Thor sat there, unsure of what to say.

“Is there anything else?” Loki ventured. “What do mortals do to fix this?”

Thor thought for a moment. “Could you make me some tea?”

Loki blinked, eyes empty of recognition.

“Heat up water in my cup. Then… I have some herbs in my bag, you just put them in when the water’s steaming. Please?”

Instantly Loki obeyed, disappearing into the tent for the herbs, then perching the cup over the licking, hissing flames, watching anxiously until white tendrils began to curl from its surface. Bringing it to Thor, fussing over him.

Thor sipped it, the hot liquid feeling good going down, banishing the chill, making him realize how cold he still was. He sighed, shoulders drooping.

Out of the silence, Loki spoke.

“We should go back.”

Thor startled, fingers tightening on the cup, eyes flashing up to Loki’s face. “What? Why?”

“Because you should stay. I almost didn’t notice in time that the cold was killing you. If you come back, I'm just going to get it all wrong again. And anyway, your mother and your sister will miss you if you go.”

“Yes, they will, but… but that’s not the point,” Thor answered, brow furrowing. This was a hard enough conversation without the greyness still lingering in his brain. “Loki, it won’t be like that.”

“It _will_ be. You were miserable for thousands of years with me. She said so. And you were happy with them. I know you were.”

Thor remembered those words, the echo of Sif’s voice. He remembered telling her that when he had first explained it. But it no longer seemed real. It had been a mistake, a misunderstanding, one he was forgetting with each hour he spent with his brother beside him.

“It’s not like that,” he insisted. “And anyway, I have to go back. I have to, to save them.”

Loki made a soft noise of distress, and his eyes gleamed in the firelight. His lip trembled. There was a very long pause that only grew longer, and Thor could feel his brother working himself up toward something. He could hear the shakiness of Loki’s breaths.

“Alright. I’ll help you. But then I’ll go.”

Thor frowned. “Go? Where will you go?”

Loki shrugged. “I can stay at the edge of the realms. I’ll keep winter there with me and it should be enough. Things will grow and you can save all the mortals and you won’t have to be miserable.”

“Loki, what are you talking about?”

Loki still wouldn’t look at him.

“I want you to be happy. And you weren’t happy with me even though I was happy with you,” Loki said, confusion in his voice as if these two things still didn’t quite fit together for him. “So I’ll go. So you’ll know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Thor could take no more. Though the cold air hurt his skin, he shrugged the blankets off his shoulders and tried to get up, which only resulted in Loki springing to his feet, horrified, and rushing to his side to pull them back over him.

But at least it meant Loki was close enough that Thor could grab hold of his hands, could pull them toward him, pressing them against his sternum, his heartbeat resonating through both their fists.

“No, you _won’t_.”

This was the cruel winter, who now couldn’t meet his eyes. The young man who had tried to bring him gifts though he couldn’t understand mortal needs. The lonely wanderer who merely wanted to look at him if Thor would grant him nothing more than that. Loki was all of those things, and now he was trying to sacrifice his own happiness for Thor’s.

The winter spirit Thor remembered would never have done that. Or so he had believed. But even if he had been right, it didn’t matter, because he was doing so now.

“I’m going back with you, and you’re going to stay with me when I do,” Thor demanded. “You said we fit together, and we do. You’re going to stay because that’s how we’re supposed to be.”

Loki looked uncertain, but Thor held his gaze, unyielding, trying to put all his determination into his eyes.

“We’re supposed to be together, and I won’t be happy without you.”

Loki stared back at him, brows drawn, and eventually he nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “If you mean that.”

Thor grinned and dragged Loki close enough to press a kiss to his lips.

*

Loki insisted upon him taking the rest of the day to recover, to sit warm and relaxed by the fire, to eat more than a few bites of food, and Thor didn’t really complain. He wanted their journey to be over with… but also, this would hopefully be his last few days of mortality. There was no point in not taking some notice of it, some enjoyment.

Each time the fire began to burn low, Loki would disappear, returning minutes later with another armful of sticks and broken logs, bark crumbling from them as he set them down with a muted clatter. He tended the little blaze—somehow under his hands it seemed like penned wildfire rather than the tamer hearth fires of home—and made sure that Thor was warm and comfortable. The weather also turned milder that day, the wind calm, the clouds a soft blanket above. It was almost pleasant. When Thor asked, Loki confirmed that it was his doing, a flicker of guilt on his face.

“It’s a little difficult, because I’m not used to it,” he shrugged. “I’m sorry I didn’t try before, though.”

“It’s alright,” Thor murmured.

The rest of the day passed gently, until they were lying down in the tent again, Thor feeling much better, the warmth of the fire somehow lingering. And a thought that had been brewing in him spilled out from his lips.

“There is something I will need your help with tomorrow,” he said.

Loki perked up, attentive.

“Do you remember when you said it was always easy to find me?”

Loki gave a nod.

“Do you think you could help me find the seer that way?”

Loki’s brows drew together. “You’re like a candle in the dark, you have been ever since I found you. But I’ve never even seen this seer of yours before. How am I supposed to know what to look for?”

Thor thought about this and wondered again how different the world really looked to Loki. How different it might look to him once he was a spirit once more.

“I’ll try, though,” Loki added.

“Thank you,” Thor murmured. “That’s all I can ask.”

*

When they started out again the next morning, they seemed to make good progress, Thor following where his brother led, Loki staying near him, protectiveness radiating off him.

Loki was just as quiet as before, but Thor was less impatient. The miles passed beneath their feet and never once did they cross their own paths or end up faced with impassable terrain. Loki would gaze out at the horizon, peering into the misty distance, eyebrows twisting.

They made camp early that night, again at Loki’s insistence, leaving enough time for him to gather up wood for another fire, time enough for Thor to sit in front of it a while before the need for sleep.

When they curled up together, Loki lay behind Thor’s back, arm latched around his middle, breath on his neck.

The faint blue moonlight seeped through above them, and Thor felt the occasional small twitch of Loki’s hand curled against his breast, like he wanted to be grasping something but wouldn’t.

“We’ll reach your seer tomorrow morning,” Loki said in the hush all around, lips brushing against Thor’s shoulder. “If we walk for an hour, we’ll be there.”

Thor’s heart thumped and his breath caught, and he felt himself smiling. “Will we?”

Loki nodded but said no more. And it wasn’t so cold that Thor couldn’t turn in Loki’s grasp to kiss him, wetly, eagerly, pulling his brother into his arms and feeling the sweet press of his body against him.

One more night and they would really be together again. But this was enough for now. And Thor held tight until sleep swept his eyelids closed.

*

The next morning, they had been walking for just over an hour when the sight of the shack rose before them at last, nestled into the same little valley amidst the trees, though now deeper in the snow.

This time, Loki gripped his hand as they approached it together.

Just like before, the seer let them in without a word and sat down before what seemed exactly the same embers, exactly the same fire.

“So you return,” the seer said when they had both seated themselves across from him.

Thor took a breath. “Yes. I need to know what I have to do to become the spirit of summer again. I know I must. And I’ve tried. But I don’t know how to do it.”

For a long moment, silence. Then the seer murmured his reply.

“The flesh does not wish to relinquish what it possesses.”

Thor blinked in confusion. “What does that mean?”

The seer then reached over and placed the palm of his hand against Thor’s forehead, pressing lightly in its center. “Your body must die for your spirit to be freed.”

An uncontrollable shiver traveled down Thor’s spine, and he couldn’t help glancing to his side, meeting Loki’s worried eyes, the firelight ruddy on his pale face. It made sense now that the seer had said it, and Thor thought he should have realized it before, but the idea was still frightening. He had died as a spirit, countless times… but he had never had a body then. This had to be different. He took a breath to calm himself.

“Is that all? Is there any particular way it must be done? Is there anything else I should know?”

The seer’s wrinkled mouth twisted, his dark eyes piercing into Thor’s. “You should know of your peril. There is a great danger in this, for your spirit has learned how to be mortal. It may have learned too well. There is a chance that dying will release you only to the world beyond, not to the realm to which you wish to return. There is a chance that you will die truly, and then all will be lost.”

Thor’s heart was in his throat. Its thumping was racing faster as the words sank in.

“So… what do I do?”

The seer wasn’t looking at him anymore, but instead to his side.

“ _He_ must be near to catch you. To guide you. He must be more than near, as close as can be—so near, his hand must be the one to release you, so that he can grasp hold of you as soon as it is done. And you must trust him enough to be certain that you will go with him gladly, no matter what tries to pull you away.”

Now the beating of Thor’s heart was painful.

Loki had to be the one to kill him.

*

They left soon after, the seer bidding them a solemn farewell, raising a hand before disappearing again into the shadows within and closing the door behind himself, and they were left standing alone in the snow, the white fields spreading out all around, empty and still.

They walked out into it, over the first rise of the land so that they were even more alone, and the whole time Thor was thinking of how they could achieve it. There was no reason to wait. He wanted to do it right away. Any delay would just be time for fear to take hold of him and make it all worse.

He tried to breathe slowly against the thumping of his heart. This was what had to happen.

And he had just opened his mouth to tell Loki what he intended when Loki instead spoke first.

“I don’t want to do this,” he said, voice thin and frightened.

Thor gazed at him and took his hands. “I know. But we have to.”

“No we don’t. Maybe I could just become like you instead. Then there would be no more winter either.”

For a moment, the idea struck Thor. He envisioned it all: a world with neither summer nor winter. With no change of seasons at all, merely an eternal in-between, and Loki becoming mortal within it as well…

He envisioned it for only a moment before the vision shattered. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he was certain in his bones that that was not an answer. That was not a world that could continue after their lives had ended. It would be the safer way for only a little while, and then… then there would be no way out at all. No one to bring either of them home.

He shook his head. “No. I have to come back with you. It’s the only way.”

Loki looked even more frantic at his resolve. “If I kill you, you’ll believe again that I hate you. Nothing is worth that.”

“I won’t,” Thor promised. “I know you love me.”

In a smaller voice, Loki went on. “But what if I lose you?”

At that Thor smiled, though the corners of his mouth trembled.

“You won’t. I trust you. I know you won’t let me fall.”

The ice-green of Loki’s eyes was watery and pale in the thin sunlight that reflected off the snow and filtered through the barren trees. His chest rose and fell.

“Are you sure?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” Thor nodded in haste. “Just don’t make me wait much longer.” And he told Loki his plan, the way he wanted it to be done.

When he finished, Loki reached out to run careful fingers through his hair, brushing it back from his face delicately, as if Thor were something fragile that he barely dared to touch. And there under the open sky, they embraced.

Thor had endured the cold all his life, lived with it and sometimes hated it and sometimes felt it was a part of him. The winter had almost killed him as a child, and a few times since. And it would finally do so now.

After a few moments, feeling barely able to breathe, he whispered to Loki that he was ready.

The cold flowed into him from Loki’s hands, and Thor shivered only a little as it took swift hold. It flowed through him, making everything seem to grow dull and fade slowly away, his eyes slipping shut, the scrape of cold lids a brief twinge. A sharp burn of cold throughout his body turning into a tingling ache, and then numbness. Even his thoughts froze, going sluggish in his head until they were completely still, but he was not afraid.

The last thing he felt—if he truly felt it at all—was a soft kiss upon his icy lips.  

*

There was a moment of darkness. Of nothingness. Of absence. Something tugging him into a deeper, emptier dark.

And then a feeling like that of a hand around his wrist, catching him.

And then light, glowing and warm and filling him and overflowing, and he was rising, soaring, the dark pull sloughing away.

Freed, the summer spirit spread throughout the world again, borderless and powerful, like sunrise spilling across a golden landscape, his full awareness rushing back to him like air, like breath, and he felt joyous laughter all around him, realizing only after a moment that it was his own.

They had done it. He was back.

And his brother’s happy laughter was woven in with his, a sound like triumph. His brother was there with him, chasing him, swirling around him, within him. Touching with long, invisible fingers. Embracing as if in disbelief, as if he could not get his fill, holding tight to him, interweaving himself with him until the summer spirit could feel his brother everywhere, could feel his joy and adoration, his excitement and his relief. And there was a newness to it, something threaded into the touch that he had not felt there before.

He was so much more now than the mortal boy he had been, but he was not the same as he was before. He felt it all more deeply. The sensations seemed richer. Everything was more precious, each brief moment full of light.

The summer spirit became aware that the winter spirit was whispering to him, whispering into his ear as he glided against him. _We will still have to fight, you know. We must_. _But it will be different now, I promise_. _In the spring, I can simply let you win._

The summer spirit smiled, with all the warmth of the sun and more happiness than he had thought he could feel. His brother was still strange to him and probably would always be. But now he understood, and things _would_ be different. Things _would_ be better. They would be better to each other.

Breathless with memories and love, he replied: _And in the fall, I will submit to you._

*

We all felt it when the winter was over, heralded as it was by a sight none of us had seen for many years, though we did not immediately know what it was we saw.

The seer—none of us knew his name—was spotted coming into the village, a cloth-covered sled  dragging behind him through the snow, ice crusted on its edges, and he hauled it by a rope over his shoulder through the lane, toward the house where Sif and Frigga lived.

Beneath the heavy fabric lay the body that we would bury later, the one the two women wept over then.

When their tears had dried enough for words, the seer was still waiting there, a quiet and unassuming form swaying slightly in the cold, hands shoved into pockets, and Frigga caught herself and invited him inside and put a kettle on. There are those among us who recall that she, who still kept the treasure of a little handwritten book of seiðr on her shelf (now with a note folded safe and secure among its pages), spoke to the seer for hours, and when their conversation was done her heart seemed eased.

We know also that in the days that followed, the first hints of spring came at last. The first warm day, the sun’s rays melting through the snow and turning it to little rivulets of clear, sparkling water. Most of what was uncovered was dead and black, the roots of all the little growing things decayed in years of winter. But life had endured, just as we had, and here and there the green things began to stretch toward the sun. In bare branches, a lone songbird sang.

It was strange how graciously the winter relinquished its hold upon the world. But regardless, the long, cruel winter was finally over, and the world had not ended. Perhaps it had been reborn.

In the weeks that followed, as the spring truly began to set in and it became more certain, the inevitable doubts and worries overcome, the young people who had never known anything but ice and cold ventured out more and more with awe upon their faces. The seasons to come would be filled with discovery. The scents of acre upon acre of rich dark soil and the things sprouting and growing within it. The sounds of a warm summer night, crickets chirping in the tall sweet grass. The healthy sweat of a day’s work in the height of summer’s heat, the breezes the only respite, a longing for winter with summer all around.

All of these things were yet to come.

And when the first summer storm hit some months later, the rain sheeting down warm and the thunder tearing the thick grey clouds, Thor’s mother was seen standing out in it, a smile on her face and her eyes far away, arms lifted as if to embrace the entire sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me at [my tumblr](http://illwynd.tumblr.com/) if you so desire.


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